


Truth Within

by DarthSuki



Series: Truth Within Verse [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Action/Adventure, Eventual Romance, F/M, More tags to be added as story progresses, Multi, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-03
Updated: 2016-04-04
Packaged: 2018-05-11 09:54:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 38,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5623171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarthSuki/pseuds/DarthSuki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fate isn’t always with a single, paved road of asphalt and leading in one clear direction. Sometimes fate is a path of challenge and turmoil; uncharted trails that lead somewhere dark and fearful, and sometimes those paths were carved, carelessly so, by those who came before us. We are sometimes left to deal with the rough road of which we had no choice, if only to find our place in the universe.</p><p>This is the rocky, dirt road of Sakajin Aditu Takio, a young half-breed who finds herself twisted in the fate her mother left behind long after the woman disappeared. When Sakajin is taken in as a mechanic and later the unwilling apprentice of General Grievous, she finds herself learning the ugly consequences of war, the pain of loss, and the worth of protecting those she cares for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. New Beginnings

**Author's Note:**

>  
> 
> [For physical reference, you can learn a little more about Sakajin here:](http://darthsuki.deviantart.com/art/Sakajin-Aditu-Takio-579010514)  
>   
> 

There is nothing more beautiful in the galaxy than a sunset. When the sky lights up with warmth, and the sun itself falls below the horizon to wash everything in the glow to send off another bountiful day and begin the calm, quiet night. Sunsets on Ev'ren are as beautiful as they are uncommon, coming only once every few years when the planet's axis tilts just right towards their star. It would remain above the horizon for a few short months, then dip below the mountains and pull the cities into twilight once more.

With its decent, celebration would follow, welcoming the familiar darkness that almost all life on the planet's surface had evolved to love and thrive in. The Tarael, the dominant species of Ev'ren, were absolutely no exception to this joy in a new cycle of twilight. The coming of darkness sparked a spiritual reconnection to nature and their planet.

For one young half-breed with only a few years to her name, it is her first experience of a sunset. She sits on her father's lap, held loosely in his arms as the rest of her extended family watch in awe from within a glass dome sitting on the very top of their family tower. The dome's sole purpose is for this event-to see the sky for the few hours as the sun dips from sight and leave the other stars their stage once more to glimmer down Ev'ren's towering cities and thick jungles.

The young girl can't even speak yet, but her emerald eyes hold a wonder that is far from subtle. She looks into the sky in awe; the vastness of space isn't entirely lost on her, but she still reaches up with her hands to play with the colors that begin to paint the darkening sky.

Her father chuckles. "I still don't understand what you see up there," He says, briefly looking straight up, to the clouds that had begun swirling in the sky. From beside him, he can hear his wife chuckle, the noise feeling like a gentle caress against his mind.

"It is because you are human," She explains. Her voice is soft as it echoes faintly in the man's head, but it is very, very powerful. "You can't see all the colors in the sky in the way that we do. They swirl and mix together like seafoam and water." As she speaks, the father can hear how the words start to lift in excitement, echoing the small noises that come from their daughter as she reaches harder still; as if inspired by her mother's description of the colors in the clouds.

"I often forget," The father begins, smiling as the child starts squirming, reaching harder for the colors as they brighten. "How much like you she is." The sun is dipping lower now, and the city below begins to fall into the crawling darkness, but little orbs of artificial lights already signify the beginning of celebration. At the top of the tower, the small family has a few more minutes to enjoy the sight, surrounded by extended cousins, aunts, uncles and then some. They murmur in excitement, all awaiting the last few moments, when the light would flicker only once more in a brazen attempt before being snuffed out. The land would be in shadow, but the sky would glow with fire and life.

Though their whispers and thoughts are excited and awed, some even beginning to speak of the week-long celebration that has already begun. They are all so happy. But for the small family, the happiness is as fleeting as the sunset, the daughter's inherited superhuman sight. It only brings worry.

"...Will she ever have it?" The father whispers to his wife, low enough in hopes that nobody can pick out his voice. His wife is silent, then laughs, a feigned sound to cover up his question to anyone that may have heard. They never risk letting anyone know about it. It risked everything they have worked for to live a happy life together.

"I don't know." The female Tarael cannot hide the intricate, complicated worry that holds onto the edges of her words. "For her sake, I hope that we never find out."

The shadows from the setting sun finally reach the top of the tower, crawling from the floor to the glass ceiling, and finally enveloping everything and everyone in the soft, dark glow of twilight. The child coos in ignorant, innocent happiness.

* * *

**Many years later...**

* * *

Sakajin woke up suffocating. Her chest felt heavy; lead weight pressed down on top of her ribs, making her lungs feel as though they were caving in on themselves as she was violently ripped from sleep. Her long ears brushed against the sides of be bed, and suddenly it felt like the room was caving in on her. Sakajin needed to breathe.

The first terrifying moments of consciousness was a mixture of reality and nightmare; her eyes searched around the bay area, waiting for a hulking beast to come barreling out every shadowy corner of the room.

Her mind echoed with that taunting, soft voice for a few seconds before it, along with the feeling of lead, began to fade away. But the fear didn't fade. It remained for a minute longer as the half-breed's body had to make heads or tails that it had been sleeping. Her stomach churned. The monsters weren't real.

It took a little while for Sakajin's heart and breathing to steady enough so she could begin collecting her bearings. Let her mind step out of the limbo between being asleep and awake. Those were the most terrifying of moments after a nightmare. They were the moments when the monsters seemed to chase after you, and for Sakajin, those monsters had been chasing her for years. The nightmares, the fear; it was nothing new, but it scared her all the same into double-checking the shadows of the bay before finally letting her eyes veer off towards the opposite wall from where she slept.

Red numbers flashed over the screen, and after a moment to comprehend the meaning of the numerals, Sakajin's stomach dropped a little bit.

At least the nightmares had a good sense of time.

She was already climbing out of the top bunk (avoiding the poles of the bedrame with her tail) and pulling her covers around her feet when the bell sounded. The lights flickered, then flashed on; it didn't bother her so much as it did everyone else in the bay, groaning and muttering to themselves about how much they hated wakeup call. But as complain as they did, everyone couldn't deny that they wanted to eat.

Sakain was already dressed for the day as the other kids rolled out of bed. The girl below her, on the bottom bunk, was always the slowest. It seemed a wonder some days that she even managed to wake up before breakfast was done being served entirely.

"Come on," Sakajin said, gently pushing a hand to the other girl's shoulder to pull her from the seductive clutches of sleep. "Come on, Tari, if you don't wake up you know you're going to be last in line." Those last in line for breakfast were never guaranteed to get something. And when the orphanage only offered breakfast for the children due to its poor funding, it meant that if a child missed breakfast they probably weren't going to get anything at all. Tari, was a young Twilek, and Sakajin distinctly recalled that she hadn't gotten much food the morning before. 

Sakajin continued to bug the girl for as long as her patience could hold out; it luckily didn't take much more than another firm nudge before the slumbering Tari began to stir.

"Leave me alone," she mumbled, almost too low for Sakajin to hear. "I don't need breakfast." She tugged the thin blanket tighter over her body, as if outright rejecting the offer.

"Oh come on," the half-breed said gently, trying not to be too rough when she tried pulling the blanket back again. The Twilek was just being stubborn-a lot of the kids were sometimes. When the only outlook of your life consisted of begging on the lower streets of the Coruscant capital, it could leave even the most hopeful of eyes dull and lifeless. "You can't lie, you said that yesterday too. I'll even show you the good streets today if you want and-"

The movement was so sharp and sudden, it caught Sakajin off guard for a moment. Tari whipped around on the bed, throwing her blanket off just enough so she could sit up and stare Sakajin down. Her expression held obvious loathing.

"Stop trying to make me do things!" She hissed, eyes feeling like hot coals burning in the fire pit. "I don't need help from a halfie like you!"

The words stung. They were a hard stone in Sakajin's stomach, settling heavy enough to make her feel sick for a moments as her mind processed the level of livid anger in the other orphan's tone. Everything started working again, reality cold and painful as she could only stare open-mouthed while Tari pulled the blanket back over herself and laid down in her bed.

Halfie. Half breed. Like an insect, it buzzed inside her head, echoing over and over even after she left the bay, even left the building.

Stupid halfie. Can't do anything useful, you don't even look normal.

No wonder your parents left you here.

Sakajin didn't bother getting breakfast that morning. She didn't want to be around anyone else in the orphanage, honestly, so she took to the lower streets of Coruscant instead. She knew most of them by heart anyway; the ones close by at least. The ones where people would pay more attention to her talents than her four-eyed face.

Most people never expected a 12-year-old to have a fascination with mechanics, let alone any ability to fix anything more complicated than glueing things back together. But Sakajin, who had built her survival on her apparent talent, wasn't exactly like most kids her age. She always had too much pride to beg, and feared too much that relying on the empathy of others alone wouldn't get enough to survive. Fixing things seemed like an easy alternative.

You did something, and someone gave you money for it. It felt more like a job than any other option she had, and when the girl found she had a skill when she was given to the orphanage, she refused to give it up for anything. It was her secret, her pride, her way of life.

There were three or four streets that always had the best people to give Sakajin their trinkets. They were the richer streets closer to the Jedi temple; where people had the money to send their things to reputable mechanics, but were too greedy to waste so much money. Why give so much credit to someone when Sakajin would only charge a small fraction in comparison? And for things like radios, comlinks and the like, it wasn't like she had a lot of room to mess up. It got her spare change, and that spare change got her food.

By the time the girl made it to her favorite street, the sky was already bright, just past breakfast time. Her stomach was already growling. She did have some bread packed away for later, but that was supposed to be for lunch, something to keep her going so she didn't have to wander back closer to the orphanage and beg like the other children. Sakajin refused to beg; it made her feel helpless.

Her resolve didn't last so long, so soon enough, she was settling herself down on the corner of a street, a thin blanket set out beneath her kneeling body, and her tools sitting just beside her, neat and orderly. This was both so she could grab any of them easily, but also to make sure that they were all still there. She'd had a few stolen a time or two, though there weren't all that many that she didn't make herself (and thus weren't all that expensive).

The day began normally, with Sakajin's mouth stuffed with bread and her eyes peering across the street, silently waiting for someone who might be familiar with her face to ask her to fix something. There were only a few who did, and only one or two of them were people who were just genuinely kind, wanting to give her a job so she had a little change in her pocket when returning to the orphanage. The rest were just the kind who wanted the cheapest job done-and who was Sakajin to argue with that? She got money either way.

It wasn't long before she got one. A gruff, humanoid-looking man handing her an object attached to a wrist-strap. She swallowed down the stale bread and took the item into her hands, rolling it over her fingers to give it a look.

After a glance-over, it was only a little entertainment projector; the internal bulb used to project the hologram looked awkwardly shoved in, and some of the wires seemed a bit twisted, so the only thing that happened when it was turned on was a fizzle, a brief flash of light.

It was an easy fix.

"I'll give you five credits," The man said, standing stiff as all old, rich men did, with no time to waste on little things like an orphan fixing his finicky equipment. It was a familiar attitude that Sakajin had grown used to seeing as a staple on the streets, and knew well how to barter with them.

"Ten," She said without a beat, already poking one of her tools into the funnel that housed the internal bulb. "I can get this done for ten credits."

"Why does a little brat like you always try to do that? Bartering up when people are already giving you money for things anyone could fix." He made it sound like she should have been grateful that he was giving her any credits, but she merely scoffed, still poking around until she coud get directly to the bulb and push it back in place with her bare fingers.

"Because if you took this to a mechanic," Sakajin said, briefly glancing up at the stiff, grumpy old man. "They could charge you a lot more." Everyone knew that. The people who only gave her one job, or the people who came back every day. They knew the only reason she was there was simply because she was convenient. Experience had taught Sakajin well how to fix most basic issues within the time it took to wait for an airbus to ferry them off into the richer, upper parts of the city. She gave the man a smug look, feeling a little amused at her own wittiness that morning. "If anyone could fix it anyway, you'd already have done it yourself."

The man didn't have much of a response for that, though whether it was because he felt sympathy or annoyance was unclear.

"Feh, you little sha'zok," He grumbled, cursing in a foreign language that Sakajin thought she heard once before. "Ten credits it is, but hurry up, I have somewhere to be."

It took some effort for the girl not to give a witty reply, because everyone told her that same sentence. People had places to be, others to meet, important things to do in their lives. And she was just….part of it, a little speck that they'd hardly recall the next day.

It was a cycle Sakajin had done over and over again for years, and she hardly figured that it would be changing anytime soon; not until she was too old to keep living in the orphanage at least, and they kicked her out. They did that every now and again to the older kids, when the budget got even worse and they couldn't afford the extra mouths to feed with one measly meal. She still had a couple years left before she was part of the oldest bunch.

Best not to dwell on the thought.

She finished up the little trinket only a few minutes later, making sure it worked in the end by turning it on. The lights flickered for only a moment before it flashed with some colors, the small hologram finally appearing above it in an image of a welcome screen for the software loaded onto the projector.

She handed it back to the gruff man, who paid her by dropping the credit chips into her palm.

"Thank you," she said, though he didn't reply. The man just took what was his, made sure she hadn't broken it further, and then stepped into the moving crowd of people stepping past her on the sidewalk. Sakajin stared down at the chips in her hand, then after a sigh, placed them in the pocket of her pants.

An hour passed, and the sun got even higher in the sky. Sakajin had already eaten all of the stale bread in her pack, and was left with the boredom of waiting for someone else to show her some sympathy (or pity, depending on the person). She called out her services every now and again in the few languages she knew, and found herself several times denied when she asked someone close enough to ask directly.

Time and time again, she'd get her hopes up, ears and tail pricking up, only to find they were just going into the building beside old cantina that kept annoying her ears when the band inside got too loud.

It was late afternoon that the hybrid started wondering if she should just start picking up her things. Ten credits wasn't a lot to one person, but when that ten credits would be the only thing feeding her, it meant a helluva lot to Sakajin. In fact, since she had long-finished the bread and felt her stomach already complaining for food, she figured that the money would be for dinner that night, maybe lunch the next day if she could hold off that long.

While she was figuring her plans out, Sakajin didn't notice that another man had approached her. She only noticed when his shadow fell over her. She peered up to see him standing over her, a towering, robed figure that made the back of her mind shiver in an odd, split-second feeling of dread and caution.

His features were hard to see beneath the hood of his robe, but figuring that he had a job for her one way or another, the child piped up.

"Have somethin' for me to fix, sir?" She asked, making sure to be extra-polite since she'd never seen the man before. Politeness always kept her on a person's better side, it sometimes even earned her an extra credit or two if they happened to be having a good day. "I can fix anything from a timekeeper to a hologram projector. I'm a lot cheaper than any other mechanic around here."

When he shifted, Sakajin caught a glimpse of the man's face. He looked older, peering at her with eyes that looked far more inquisitive than anything else. Like he was searching her face. She shrugged the feeling off and tried to look and feel calm while waiting for his response, which took a few long seconds. It started to feel a bit awkward, and she ready to open her mouth to ask again when he finally spoke.

"Do you think you could handle a comlink?" His voice was deep, rumbling calmly, like a tone she expected from a grandfather. Without hesitation he reached into his robe, and pulled out the small device to hand over to her.

"It depends on what's wrong with it," Sakajin whispered, her focus already shifting onto the small piece of technology; she couldn't remember the last time she'd fixed one. Even then, the fix had been purely aesthetic due to a cracked casing. "I'm not gonna try fixing something that I can't fix."

"That's an admirable quality," The man said, as if he was weighing everything she said, which was odd enough. But the man's eyes fell heavy on her as well, and she knew that he was watching, though for what, Sakajin didn't want to try figuring out. She didn't reply either.

With a bit of careful prying, the child got the casing off the comlink, and looked over the few, but complex, components within. Thankfully, the problem looked obvious. One of the crystals that kept communications between complinks stable looked cracked. When she explained this to the man standing in front of her, he finally seemed to shift, breaking his stone-cold form when he brought a hand up to stroke at his chin.

"How long have you been doing this?" It was calm, conversational. In fact, the man's question came at such a surprise that she almost dropped the tool she was fumbling with.

Sakajin looked up at him, then awkwardly, back down to the broken comlink. Obviously, she wasn't used to anyone trying to talk to her outside of forcing her asking price as far down as they could, as if the orphan wasn't already asking for cheap compensation for fixing random bits.

"I…." The memories all ran together, as did time. She had kept track of it long ago, but after the first year the girl just...stopped. There wasn't much of a point. "I came here when I was 12, and I think...it's been two years?" She let out a sigh, but glanced up to answer him more firmly. "Two years, sir." It was hard to remember even that much. A lot of her memories had turned foggy.

"Fourteen years old and able to fix things as complicated as a comlink?" He said, stepping off to the side of the sidewalk to get out of the constant current of passerbys, though it took Sakajin a moment to realize that it meant he was standing directly beside her set-up. The feeling of cautious rose up in her chest again, but fell as the man continued in that gentle, grandfather-like tone. "You're quite a talented young lady. Not one I've seen before."

"I'm sure there are a lot of people better than me," Sakajin tried to shrug off his compliments. It was confusing what he hoped to get from them, if they were anything other than hallow, kind words.

"But not as many who are so young."

It was hard to get the crystal out of it's housing, so the girl resorted to breaking it out, using the existing fracture as a way to pry it apart even more. The crack sounded loud enough to hear even through the hum of conversation and noise passing in front of her spot on the road. It was an intended noise, but it left her feeling a little more awkward, if only because she broke a very integral part to the comlink and the owner himself was staring at her working, more or less.

She felt a little nervous, wondering if he was about to call her incompetent, try to raise a fuss that she had broken his item without any sense to what she was doing. But the man was silent, simply letting her work as she replaced the crystal with one of her own, one she had been keeping in a little pouch with the rest of the random bits from discarded parts and junk tech.

With a little bit of working, it managed to fit perfectly within the chamber, and the rest was just putting it back together.

"How did a child like you get here?" The man questioned gently, taking back the communicator. "I only recognize your species from someone I once knew long ago." Sakajin couldn't force her focus anywhere else but up at the man's face, and noticed that she could finally see most of his features with the light from the settling sun. He looked old and dignified, with a face that told a story all in itself, his eyes a mix between soft and solemn. And those eyes were still on her, waiting for an answer that felt hard to give.

"My parents…." Sakajin felt a bit of a rock in her throat, but swallowed it back. It had been years since the disappearance of one, but the death of the other still left a harsh pain deep in her chest when she thought about it. "My father died before I came here. My mother…." She paused, unsure if he was legitimately asking about such a stupid, cliche sob story that almost every orphan could give him. She wasn't the only one with dead or lost parents.

"Your mother left?" he offered, and Sakajin nodded, not bothering to go into detail on the matter. It didn't feel very appropriate, especially with a man she barely knew, no matter how friendly he looked. But she did feel as though he didn't mean any harm by the questioning. The hybrid wasn't sure how, but it was a feeling, deep in her chest that offered an almost unconscious reassurance that didn't come all that often with other people.

The silence that came after made Sakajin feel a little twitchy. She waited for him to say something, eyes finally glancing down at the worn fabric she had lying beneath her body.

"What is your name, little one?"

Green eyes blinked, and deft, oil-stained fingers started playing with the little tools sitting beside her. Sakajin was far out of the zone of comfort, at least in terms that she couldn't remember the last time anyone wanted to know her name. She couldn't remember the last time that anyone cared about her, honestly, so the fact that a random old man was asking felt….weird. In a good sort of way, at least, so her response was quiet.

"Sakajin," She mumbled. The man, who had amazing hearing to hear the word despite the background noise of people and hovercars alike, repeated it.

"Sakajin," he said, as if trying to recount it in his memory, looking over his fixed comlink with a curious expression. "...Well, it seems to me you know your way around machines. Far more than I can say for anyone your age, or species for that matter."

The mention of her race put the girl at a moment of cautious curiosity. It was a touchy subject for those who knew enough to see that she was only a half-breed, and even touchier when those people decided that she was worth less as a living being because her father was a human and her mother was not. Even as a young child, she knew to keep people thinking she was just another exotic species from the outer rim planets. It made things easier.

"What do you know about my species?" She finally asked, deciding at last to start putting away her tools. "You sound like you know stuff about them."

The man huffed, turning over the comlink in his fingers before turning his face and seeming to look out into the crowd of people. Sakajin didn't know what he was doing at first, and merely followed the trail of his gaze, but finding nothing but a constantly-shifting crowd of people, none of which seemed to be paying an old man and a poor girl any mind whatsoever. Perhaps that was what he was looking to see.

"I know enough," he finally said, reaching into a pocket and pulling out a handful of credit chips. Sakajin already felt there were too many when he saw the man holding him, but her eyes didn't widen until she saw what color they were.

She froze, staring at the handful that took both of her hands to hold, an uncountable number of chips. There was another rock in the girl's throat, one that kept her from saying anything while her mind merely tried to get past the cog kicked into the gears, figuring out (slowly) that the chips she held weren't denominations of 1, but 10 in themselves. She held at least fifty chips, so…

"Sir? I-this-" The girl had never been paid more than ten credits at one time, so seeing that many felt like some sort of error. Of course, he seemed like a man who was able to count and see just fine, so she just stared dumbly between the credits and up to the man's face. "-this isn't right. This is at least-"

"500 credits," He finished for her, proving that he knew exactly how much he had paid for something that anyone else would be tried to give her three or four for. Hesitantly, the young girl took them as just coming from a very, very friendly old man, and started pouring them into her little pouch. The kind old man, having put away his comlink, knelt down next to her so he was almost eye-level. Sakajin finally peered her eyes up to look into his own just as he spoke. "You did quite a beautiful job. You are a very resourceful young girl, despite what you've endured. Your mother would have been quite proud of you, Sakajin."

Her heart froze for a moment. Looking as though he knew the reaction he would get from what he said, the man waited patiently for the response, as if he had absolutely nowhere else in the world to be.

The thoughts that flew through the girl's mind were scattered and stupid, coming out of her mouth without much of a filter to stop and think for just a few moments. "...Did you know my mother?"

It was just a well-meaning wish, one anyone could think to say to an orphan, if only to try to instill the fact that their lost parents would be proud of where they were. But the man said it with more meaning, like he had known the woman personally. Something about his tone, his stance, or simply the look in his eyes set Sakajin's mind to thinking it was more than just that.

And it all finally came crashing down when the man's smile got only wider, and he carefully lifted back the hood on his robe.

"Your mother was a close acquaintance of mine. My name is Count Dooku."  
She stared at him. The entire world seemed to stop, all in the span of time that it took for him to say that sentence. The people around her, passing by without a thought, the cantina buzzing with noise or the cars all whizzing by overhead. None of it mattered to her, as her mind held tight only to the man's words. Count Dooku. The name in itself sounded regal, like he was a man who was far, far more than a friendly old grandfather type. Her mother would have known some very important people in her life, and apparently, this man was one of them.

The Count didn't wait for her to say anything in return, but stood up once more and pulled his hood back over his head. The girl's green eyes tracked him, not straying even for a moment, when her pouch fell over and spilled out some of the credit chips he had given her.

"I am willing to offer you something far better than the life of a beggar, " Dooku began, adjusting his robe and turning to look once more towards the shifting crowd of people, towards the setting sun as it just started to dip into the horizon (though was already covered by the shape of far-away buildings). Sakajin blinked at him. Trying to comprehend everything that he was saying beyond the fact that he knew her mother, however personally. He knew her enough to know Sakajin existed-that Annamarie had a daughter named Sakajin. The questions had no end to them, but the girl couldn't even begin to think of asking.

"I've been looking for a mechanic as of late, and considering I made a bit of a promise to your mother, I feel you are well qualified for it."

Mechanic. Job. Offer? Her head was swirling with what it all meant. Just one surprise after another, all in rapid succession and it left the girl dazed. But he knew her mother, and he was, without mistake, offering her a job. Even she, the little 14-year-old who'd gotten by on change alone, understood the depth of how much the offer meant to her. It would change her entire life.

She wouldn't be making loose change anymore. She'd have a job, maybe even a place to lay her head down for the night where she wasn't surrounded by dozens and dozens of other people who thought her beneath them. It was an idea that seemed just as stupid and far-off as seeing her mother again, whom she had long accepted as being dead.

Sakajin jumped up onto her feet, so quickly in fact that she wobbled, nearly falling back onto her tail when she beamed up at the man.

"A job?" She asked, wanting to hear the man say it again, one more time so she could be sure her mind wasn't just so starved to exhaustion that she was hearing things.

"Yes," Dooku said, chuckling and raising a brow of amusement. "A job. I've been looking for someone who can be a droid mechanic for some very….specialized models. Nothing I'm sure you can't pick up, with how much you already seem to understand." His eyes seemed to glimmer with more information than he let on, but Sakajin, too excited for the fact that someone had listened to some of her thoughts at night, didn't notice at all. "I assume you want to take my offer?"

"Yes!" The girl shouted. The yell was so loud that it drew some attention, a few pairs of eyes peering over at the odd pair for a few moments. But they quickly turned away, back to their own business while Dooku shushed her with a wave of his hand. She picked up her things in a haste, dropping her voice, though her expression never fell. "Mr. Dooku, I just-I'm-thank you." She felt as much of a stumbling mess as her words sounded, dropping a few of her tools in the haste to get everything together.

"No need to thank me," The man murmured, leaning down to pick up the last tool Sakajin had dropped, handing it to her carefully. "Consider it a return of a favor on something your mother did for me."

The man smiled, and Sakajin, feeling stupidly giddy, smiled back.

They never did return to the orphanage for any paperwork, though when the man promised to tell Sakajin more of her mother, she hardly cared in the slightest. It took less than 24 hours for her to settle into the ship the man commanded. She had her own bedroom, her own job, and never had to worry about being picked on or hungry. For the first time since she was a little girl, Sakajin finally felt like she was safe, in an emotional and financial sort of manner. She felt like the world wasn't threatening to crumble beneath her feet, thanks to a mysterious man who knew her mother and gave her a chance.

But it would be several years before Sakajin would realize the offer was far more complicated than simply giving her a job. And that realization had a name.

General Grievous.


	2. Path to the Present

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sakajin adapts to the new environment that comes with being a mechanic for one of the first ships in the newly-formed Separatist arsenal, the Black Halo. She learns that even with a job and food, life isn't as peaceful as she assumed it would be. This realization comes when she meets General Grievous, leader of the droid armies, and realizes quickly that it's not a good idea to get on his bad side.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so long story short, this was supposed to be around 5k words long, like the first chapter. But I had gotten a few pages in before I realized that I had written stuff that wasn't even originally in my chapter draft. IT'S NOT A BAD THING OF COURSE, I JUST FIND IT A CONSTANT AMUSEMENT WHEN I MANAGE TO GO OVER MY EXPECTATIONS OF WORD COUNT.
> 
> I never realized how long this is, but since this is more like a series of snapshots leading up to where the story's timeline officially 'begins' I feel that it can possibly be excused.

In the years that followed Sakajin’s ‘adoption’, she was quick to learn a great many things. These ranged from purely technological understanding to day-to-day common sense. She learned how to put together and take apart several models of droids and how to repair some and scavenge others for parts, which was what she had mostly expected of herself. 

But the young girl also learned how to mend her own clothes when work tore them to shreds, or even how to take care of her own cuts, scratches and bruises that came from working in her day-to-day environment. Among everything she did have to learn, Sakajin never had to worry about being mugged or hurt for her money. 

And who was going to do that on a ship--the droids themselves?

The Black Halo, a large battleship which she knew little about, quickly transformed from ship to home in her eyes. It had been the place she slept and worked since the day Count Dooku took her in, plucked straight off the streets of Coruscant. There really were a lot of perks to living on a ship and in the employment with its owner, with one of them being the fact that she never worried about where she’d sleep or if she’d have enough food to eat. In sacrifice, however, Sakajin almost never saw anyone. Not a soul. Nobody that wasn’t composed of durasteel at least.

No non-droids actually seemed to live on the ship; besides herself and Dooku at least. Most whom Sakajin wound up seeing from day-to-day, maybe even twice a week, wound up being political ambassadors from some planet or system;. They were people who wanted to talk to Count Dooku alone for some reason or another, Sakajin never bothered to ask anything much. 

There was never a need or desire to question Count Dooku’s affiliation. Just easier that way, not making herself worry on who was doing good or bad in the galaxy--no other politician or government helped her all that much, so she felt little loyalty to anyone beside Dooku himself. 

But she wasn’t ignorant. Nor did she block the news out completely, what filtered through databases and from Dooku himself in the very rare times Sakajin saw him face-to-face. War was coming. Systems were separating from the Galactic Republic at an almost alarming rate. And how did she know this? Well, Dooku was one of the reasons several had already separated. But she cared not what side she was on, or the reasons that there were even sides at all--she was mechanic, not a politician. 

But, due to those highly mechanical talents and perhaps even related to the growing hostilities, Sakajin became the ship’s droid specialist. Her job included keeping tabs on the quality of the droids on the ship, and repairing those that weren’t so easily replaced. But of course, that’s not how she started--how could anyone ask a 14-year-old girl to do work that required years of experience first? And that’s what Dooku did--he let her get experience, another thing she had to add to reasons she felt loyal to the man, when he could have easily kept walking on the street.

She begun with the B1 models, which were almost laughably simplistic even when she started on the Black Halo. The droid consisted of a durasteel skeleton, a working system of joints, and a fairly basic AI program loaded onto the internal server so they understood basic orders and combatives with blasters. 

Once the mechanic had figured out their ins-and-outs, she moved onto another model (B1 Super Battle Droids), and then another model of droid (Droidekas). After her first year of learning and tinkering, Sakajin was finally assigned the task it seemed that Dooku had planned for in the first place, which finally answered quite a few questions that the girl could never get much of an answer for (as they had a fairly standard system for recycling broken droids already in place).

Sakajin found a certain level of beauty in the IG-100 Magnaguard model. It was beyond anything she had seen in a droid thus far, with a variety of capabilities that made her wonder what sort of genius had even designed something like it, let alone what it was created to do. 

Experimental, Dooku had said. It was a droid he wanted to commission more for, but he wanted her to start learning how to repair it, how to utilize all the parts that made it up. Sakajin never recalled asking why.

The first ones she had to play with were hollow, lacking a functioning AI system beyond what kept them standing up on their own feet. They were the first few created, and the goal was simply to learn how to take them apart and put them back together--learn how every part fit with another one in the giant interconnected system of the droid itself. It was how Sakajin had learned most of what she knew in the first place for any other droid model.

A few months into her part-time tinkering, she was given the first working models from their unknown creator. That was the day she came into her own personal workshop to find two pairs of glowing red eyes staring down at her, as if waiting for an order, droids with a metallic frame still so shiny and new that she could see her face in the reflection over their chests. At a foot or two taller than she was herself, Sakajin found the droids...intimidating, at best. 

Unlike the B1 or Droideka, the Magnaguards had a surprising capacity to learn, specifically to fight (no surprise there). And while she could test their dexterity, speed and basic maneuverability in her own tests, fighting….that wasn’t her thing at all. Sakajin no more knew how to teach the droids on using a electrostaff or blaster than she did on how to cook a nice dinner. 

Eventually, Sakajin approached Count Dooku on what he wanted when it came to testing the droids on their combat capabilities.

“You’ve done your job,” he had told her, giving one of those half-warm smiles that vaguely akin to what every ambassador wore when they came on the ship. “There is someone else who will be furthering their...programming, your job with them is done, for now.” 

He left without letting her ask what he’d meant--off to another meeting, another planet to annex into the Separatist movement; it had been gaining traction and followership since Sakajin could remember taking apart her first B1 droid, though even then, the political strife in the galaxy continued to feel inconsequential to her.

His words didn’t make sense until shortly after the mechanic’s 17th birthday, nearly a month later.

* * *

Her morning begun as they always did--to the sharp, crackling sound of beeping from the comlink on her wrist. Sakajin slid out of bed with the edges of her dreams still clinging to her eyes, and started dressing herself with the plainclothes she’d mended at least four or five times over. Considering how many times the clothes had been sewn back together, it wouldn’t be a surprise if there wasn’t actually a scrap of the original cloth left. Their stitched appearance didn’t matter all that much anyway, most of Sakajin’s clothes were hand-made, and based purely on their function rather than looks. Gloves to keep from cutting up her hands, wraps for her feet, and a sash to hold any extra little bits and pieces a mechanic came to figure they needed every day.

After pulling on her short, poncho-like top, she retrieved her belt of tools that hung on the corner of her bed and counted off every pocket to make sure the tool was there. There had been more than one occasion that one came up missing, and Sakajin much rather figure out they had merely fell and rolled beneath her bed before she went to the mechanical issuing bay to try getting a replacement.

Ten minutes; that’s all the time she needed to get ready for the day after getting out of bed. After nearly three years, it had become almost second-nature to her, a rhythm she’d memorized to get started each day.

Sakajin saw a breathtaking sight when she finally stepped out of her room and glanced up, just across the hall: A red-orange gas-giant, just outside the ship’s window. It was hundreds of miles away from their spot in an orbit, but yet it looked close enough to reach out a hand and run fingers through it’s milky sunset-colored clouds. It looked like planet filled with a sea of sunsets. Despite the wonder that shivered within her mind, Sakajin wasn’t at all surprised by the sight.

She’d seen the same view several times before with several different worlds, but the effect was never truly muffled. Her emerald eyes gazed over each world with the same child-like wonder as the last. It was akin to waking up to a sunrise outside a bedroom window, being a visage of awe-inspiring beauty that most might attempt to weave poetry about--but she merely let it fuel her day.

One could even say the sight served as much functionally as it did aesthetically in Sakajin’s morning routine.

Orbiting a planet typically meant that Count Dooku was meeting with someone, someone very important. This could have been taking place on the ship itself, though since the last couple times had the Count leaving the ship to meet the leaders on their own planet, Sakajin figured the pattern would remain the same. At least she’d be working at her own pace, as he’d be gone for the whole day and wouldn’t bother adding any more tasks to her workload.

Sakajin found herself lingering in the hallway for just a few extra minutes. A glance wouldn’t be appropriate to take in the planet in its entirety, especially when it could hold so many intricate wonders that she’d never experienced before--and it was, for another being, their entire life and existence. It glowed and glimmered in it’s fullest spectrum--her human-built eyes could see the gentle orange glow, but the second set above them, the ones seemed given to her by her mother, could see a flurry of colors more. The planet glowed, far more in the sense that it was doing more than just reflecting light--she could see the faint layer just above the clouds, like a bubble that enveloped the entire planet. She never learned what it was called, but she figured it had something to do with how the sunlight reached the atmosphere--and regardless of her ignorance, it was beautiful.

When was the last time she was planetside? A year? Two years?

The surprising thing was that Sakajin didn’t know--whenever they were orbiting a planet, it was almost always political in intent. It wasn’t as if she could get permission to land on the surface for a sightseeing trip. The ship itself provided everything she needed--water, food, clothing (second-hand, but clothing nonetheless). The only thing that ever seemed to lack was the ability to talk to people, and that wasn’t particularly necessary for her job, so thus, no going down to a planet. Dooku had mentioned on a few occasions he had an interest in taking her with one time or another, but he hadn’t brought it up again for a while. Sakajin lost a lot of hope in ever seeing a planet’s surface again, honestly.

She did pretty well by herself--she’d done the same a child anyway, keeping her mind entertained on tinkering and learning the skills required for (essentially) knowing just about every bolt for several common or powerful droid models.. And there was so much to learn for the young girl; not even five combined years of working with machinery had given her more than the very start of mastery. Sakajin knew there was still so much more she’d yet to even begin, especially if she would want to learn more droid models, or even the basics of programming that went into their AI system. 

The view of the planet eventually begun to wear off, and Sakajin, linger as she might, knew she had actual work to do that day. She left the window with a bittersweet smile, wondering in the back of her head if she should bring up the possibility of asking the Count if she could attend one of his meetings sometime. Even if she got to see the surface of a new planet, the mechanic knew it would be enough for her. It was easy to forget what actual dirt or grass felt like beneath her feet, and dreams could only give her so much sensory satisfaction before they too wore thin.

The workshop wasn’t all that far from Sakajin’s small, personal quarters. Perhaps a ten minute walk at most, a few floors down a lift. It had almost everything she could desire or want of a workshop. From the most to the most advanced tools, scrap parts, and even broken droid shells themselves to tinker with if she ever got bored and just wanted to take them apart like puzzles (the B1 was perfect for that purpose); it seemed to have everything a mechanic could ever want or need. It was even mildly spacious--if she extended both arms out from her body, Sakajin could fit perhaps five of her across from the door to one wall, then maybe ten along the opposite axis. It was just enough room for her to work, especially since she was often the only person in there at all, and she had grown more than used to its size in the three years she had been on-ship.

It had become as familiar to her as the streets of Coruscant had--with far less noise and chaos everywhere. Er. Well, her chaos at times was at least under control, rather than the mindless crowd of people and the zooming hovercars overhead.

Sakajin stepped out of the lift with her eyes already turning down the hall, tail trailing in a softly flicking motion with each gentle step on the metal floor. Her steps were quiet, muffled if only by the fact that she wore no hard-sole shoe, but rather the soft wrappings to protect the back half of her foot. But she never seemed to get used to how cold it felt--even after several years. One of the reasons the entirety of her workroom floor was covered in non-flammable cloth.

The doors slid open for her upon approach, with the command console blinking green, needing no password nor fingerprint when it already had locked the permissions. Too much of a hassle to try finding her card or trying to let it read her fingerprints. She had lasted in using the lock for maybe the first month, sometimes having to wait up to a minute or two just for the system to stop locking up (no pun intended) and finally open the door so she could get started on her work--and locking the permissions didn’t take any work. Just reroute some very basic settings from the command console itself from inside the room.

Nobody ever came into the workroom besides herself and Count Dooku.

The first hour of working was tedious, and the worst kind of them all; Sakajin had to sit through, reading various tasks she’d been given over the last week, checking serial numbers of droids she’d repaired and making sure they were correct, and checking to see if there were any new shipments coming in she’d been assigned to check for quality control.

Oh, it was the real fun of her job.

It was only supposed to take, at most, an hour of her day. 

Only after twenty minutes though, Sakajin heard the sound of the door opening across the room. It didn’t alarm her, but with the possibility of it being the Count or one of the ranking battle droids with orders, she didn’t want to simply ignore them. She turned to look away from the screen, mouth opening already to ask what they needed--

And it wasn’t Count Dooku. Nor was it a battle droid. In fact, with a sinking feeling in her stomach, the woman realized that she had never actually met this person before, and he had just….walked right in. There was an instant feeling of regret in locking the permissions of the door’s lock.

He was tall--unbelievably so, even though the figure appeared as though he was hunched over--with the eyes like a beast. In fact, the golden, slitted orbs seemed to be the only natural thing about him. From what Sakajin could gain from barely a glance within the shroud of his black cloak, the being seemed to be almost entirely made of durasteel. The pieces of his thin body gleamed, even in the dim light of her workroom. He seemed to speak with an anger that made the entire room tremble. 

“You!” He hissed, voice deep and dripping with disdain, and he hadn’t been in the room more than a few seconds. He reached up an arm to jab a pointed, claw-like finger at her. “You are the mechanic?” He took a step forward. Sakajin took a step back. He towered over her, easily, and by instinct alone the intimidation that this unknown creature seethed with was enough to make her stutter.

“I--I am...s-sir?” It was equal parts fear and confusion that caused the mechanic’s brain to stop working. She’d never met this creature before, but he looked at her with a fury of a beast on a hunt. And this metallic beast, for lack of better description, glared at her for an empty second. She didn’t know if her response meant something to him--as if confirming her job had any sense or logic into whether he should continue to look as though ready to murder her then and there. She gulped and took the chance. “...Is there anything I can do for y-”

“Fix this droid,” He spat, interrupting her without care as he gestured to a droid that stepped into the room behind him--a Magnaguard. It’s arm was almost missing, with bits and pieces hanging off by the wires themselves. The edges of what was left of the droid’s arm looked burned and scorched with what she could only guess was some sort of laser cutter. It stood there, frozen, waiting for another order that never came from either mechanic or the unknown metallic alien who seemed plenty pissed at her without her knowing his name.

As she stared at the droid, the cloaked figure growled, kicking at a piece of scrap metal that had rolled beside his foot from his aggressive entrance as if offended that it had neared him. 

“I want it repaired by the end of this solar cycle, and I’ll return for it.” He turned towards her with one sharp movement, and it made Sakajin twitch in subtle surprise. She could feel his eyes glaring holes into her as he continued to hiss lowly. “I won’t stand for anything less than perfection in what Dooku promised to me as fighters.”

Sakajin wasn’t sure if that sentence actually required a response from her--it was always hard to tell what was hypothetical, and what was a legitimate comment, hanging, waiting for her input.

“....I can assure you there shouldn’t be any defects,” She tried to explain, feeling that maybe this was some ambassador, a man who had been given the droids in some sort of recent trade or deal made with the Count. “I tested the alpha’s myself and I-”

“Shut your mouth, girl,” The figure hissed, sharp and quick enough that not only did it cut off the mechanic’s words, it also kept her from speaking. He was the embodiment of fear, and she wanted no reason to cross him, make him remain any longer in her workroom than absolutely needed. When she didn’t try to start talking again, he let out a slow, rough sigh, and stood up straighter. “I will be back in half a solar cycle.” And without even letting Sakajin gape in his ludicrous demand--how did he expect her to repair an entire limb from essentially nothing in half a day?--the figure strode out of the room just as quickly as he had entered. The air was left feeling thin, cold, and gave a sour taste in Sakajin’s mouth. She peered over at the droid, who stood there silently--a perfect example of how well the Magnaguards could take orders, standing as still and lifeless as a metal statue until given a job to do, with no intelligent AI besides one programmed only to fight or pilot ships.

How anyone could take off its entire arm, she didn’t know. But what really made her curious was the marks left behind--scorched metal outlined on the shoulder where it had been, essentially, sliced right off, with the only pieces left being those that attached other than the shoulder itself, with some frayed, burned wires. How the man had been able to do that was far beyond Sakajin’s imagination.

That was the day that Sakajin, without knowing who he was in name or stature, met General Grievous, new commander newly-formed Separatist droid armies. And, unfortunately for the hope that he had just been an aggressive ambassador, he was someone that Sakajin saw very often. 

Far, far more often than she wanted.

He didn’t even bother to learn that she had a name until at least the third or fourth week of working her like a slave. He had her doing tasks constantly--most of them running tests or repairing Magnaguards. It wasn’t until then that she learned what the droids had been for in the first place, or why the Count had been so vague in who would program their fighting ability--he had been referring to the General. 

Grievous was, as Sakajin learned through rumor and snippets of information that the General himself wouldn’t filter with his near-constant snarling at her, the apprentice of Count Dooku. He was a fighter, obviously, but it didn’t dawn on her that the scorch marks she had originally observed on the first Magnaguard were the evidence of a lightsaber slice. From then, she had to continue to repair whatever of them that Grievous brought to her, often having a very short span of time to get them done (and more often than not, she failed).

Time became a blur, as did her interactions--which were frequent--with the general. He became a daily figure in her life, someone that she had to report to where Count Dooku had once been. 

She didn’t like the General in the slightest. Where Dooku, while as sly as a snake, was at least seemingly polite and held no physical punishment when Sakajin failed, Grievous was as much of a beast as her original observations had made him out. On more than one occasions she’d felt what it was like to suffocate, held up by the collar of her shirt and feeling the fabric tighten around her neck. For being a skeleton of durasteel, Grievous was nothing less than raw power.

But it seemed that threats didn’t appease him well enough after a few weeks. Instead, the general seemed to devise a much better method of intimidating her, just in the days that Sakajin felt as though the trickle of Magnaguards needing repairs were starting to slow.

She was so, so wrong.

* * *

He had her in his sparring room on one random day, with no warning as to the reason or what he even wanted her for. She had done everything in her power to struggle, but his grip only tightened with every word as he dragged her there. She wasn’t a fighter. Sakajin, in no way, shape or form, was anything other than a mechanic. She didn’t want to die either--she had come to figure going by the strike of a lightsaber was probably a pretty painful death. But it scared her even more to think that perhaps she simply wasn’t useful enough to keep alive anymore--that somehow, Grievous thought it was a good idea to off the little mechanic for his own amusement.

While she did plenty for the quality control of the droid armies on the Black Halo and for his personal Magnaguard group, Sakajin knew she wasn’t all that important of personnel--after all, she was one of the only ones on the ship that wasn’t made of metal. And after three (four?) years living a peaceful, healthy life as a stupid little mechanic, it only seemed that the life had to end at some point. 

The sparring room was enormous. The center was a flat, empty floor, with her on one side and he on another. Honestly, Sakajin was amazed that she was even able to stand there, legs wobbling, but stable only from her annoyance and anger alone. She was sick of how he treated her, sick of being tossed around like a ragdoll and downright pissed that he was going to strike her down like a useless scrap of metal from a bigger piece. It pissed her off as much as it terrified her. She simply couldn’t defend herself--from the few times Sakajin had caught the last few moments of he and Dooku sparring, it was obvious she was little more than an infant in terms of a threat. 

She was as good as dead if he truly wanted to kill her.

But where she expected to shut her eyes in the very same moment that a white-hot lightsaber would come crashing down her shoulder, Sakajin instead felt the hard, solid weight of metal crashing into her chest. It felt at first like a blow, and she was sent back as the weight knocked her off-balance, but falling with her as she came crashing down hard onto the metal floor.

A long, rod-like shape pressing over her stomach, an object that didn’t move. It wasn’t a blow. When Sakajin opened up her eyes--dazed as she was--she found a weapon sitting on her body, sparking and sizzling at each end with a pink-hued energy. 

It took her a few seconds to realize it was an electrostaff that had been thrown at her instead of an actual strike of a weapon--as Grievous stood there with one himself, poised in a solid fighter’s stance and a look of amusement in his darkened eyes. 

He was toying with her.

It took a few more seconds to realize that she was given it to use--because before the woman had a chance to get back up onto her feet and catch her break, a shadow was already towering over her form.

She had barely a moment of time before she launched herself to one side in a frantic attempt to avoid the white-hot blade that came down in the spot she was just milliseconds before. The landing wasn’t graceful either, as Sakajin landed rolling, hitting the ground hip-first and feeling a sharp, deep pain flash through her entire body. 

“You have good reaction time,” Grievous purred mockingly, though Sakajin only heard bits and pieces from the throbbing that she felt in her body, mind barely able to concentrate about anything other than how much it hurt to try standing up again. But she managed, pulling herself up and awkwardly trying to figure out how to hold the metal staff in her hands. Grievous….waited. He just waited for her to get up again, his eyes looking just as sharp and toying as they had before. “You might prove somewhat amusing for me, girl.”

Sakajin only had a split second of time to react from the end of his sentence to his approach--a sharp step forward, managing to travel ground much faster than she expected of someone who weighed three or four times more than she did. She reacted in fear. It was a bristling feeling, like needles up and down her spine, and it forced her on instinct to raise the only weapon she held above her head, blocking the downward strike of the lightsaber only by luck alone with one sparking end of the electrostaff--the two weapons sizzled and sparked for a moment before Sakajin, who had absolutely no strength in comparison to Grievous, practically crumpled beneath the pressure and weight.

She went down like dead weight, falling back as the General’s strength prevailed over her own--but instead of falling straight down, she rolled once more off to the side. Somehow, she managed to pull her weapon with her, that time narrowly missing the strike of the lightsaber to her tail by mere millimeters--she sworn there was a slight smell of burning fur in the air.

Like before, she didn’t land on her feet--as if luck loathed her, the mechanic fell again onto her hip, the same hip as the first time. It slammed into the metal and jolted her into a moment of panic and pain. But this time, Grievous didn’t wait for her to get up. Before she had a moment to breathe, he was over her again. The cyborg kicked the electrostaff right out of her hands and sent it flying until it hit the wall on the other side of the room, leaving her defenseless to his strike. She curled her arms over her head instinctively and waited for the end, the blackness of death

It didn’t come. However, what did come to her was the definite feeling of pain. A burning to her forearms, sharp and throbbing, that only lasted for a few seconds at most. She yelped and rolled away from the pain on instinct, finally kneeling on the floor, cradling her limbs close against her chest as she looked up to Grievous, who stood there like he was gloating over her pain.

In all honesty, Sakajin had expected to be dead, so her eyes were frantic, staring from his weapon to his face, not quite understanding the fact that she was alive, or at the very least still had her arms attached, even if they were stinging and burning.

It seems that Grievous had more of a plan in his mind than just killing her. And he laughed; it was a deep, rough sound that made the mechanic shiver, because good things almost never followed it--physically, or verbally.

“Count Dooku would find it very disappointing if you perished,” He said in another low, mocking purr, as if he had known all along she’d been thinking he was about to kill her--probably took some sadistic joy in the fear that had been in her eyes. “But you lasted longer than I thought you did. Perhaps you will be of more amusement than aggravation to me after all, little girl.” Sakajin couldn’t describe how those words, just those words alone, sent a chill down her spine. Those words held a suggestion that the cyborg general would want to do that again.

“But sir--” She said, despite the fear and the pain throbbing through her arms. “I’m a mechanic--”

“You are nothing,” Grievous interrupted with a snarl. “Be grateful that the most damage my weapon can cause to you is burns. I despise having my own lightsaber at low power.” The words sounded like a curse, as if it made his mouth bitter in merely speaking them--but it explained why Sakajin’s arms were still attached to her body. She had never once thought that a lightsaber could do anything less than what she’d heard in stories, could actually be tuned back to a lower level of damage.

She didn’t feel all that grateful though when, an hour later, she was in her workshop and trying to wrap her forearms with bandages. The pain from the burning subsided a little with a salve she managed to get from the medical wing, but it wasn’t made for her biology, so the dosage wasn’t high enough to take away all of it, leaving every movement for a few days stinging just enough to make the mechanic twitch.

* * *

That cycle continued for as long as Sakajin could remember. Though Grievous began asking little of her services to repair his Magnaguards, since he was finally training them enough so that they didn’t lose limbs, he began forcing her to act as some sort of plaything. She couldn’t understand the logic--he had a whole team of Magnaguards, finally attuned to his fighting style and the styles of other warriors, and he chose to make Sakajin fear that she’d die of terror whenever he came bursting into her workroom to tell her he wanted to spar again.

She wasn’t even a fighter.

And it was obvious that she wasn’t--the first several, long, painful weeks of his odd torture left her with more burns on her arms and legs than Sakajin could count, and a solid bruise that bloomed on her hip from the first fight that seemed to take longer to heal than anything else. 

Sakajin became a mechanic and, apparently, a part-time punching bag. She sure felt like one, barely able to last more than a minute or two at a time when her superior decided he needed to take out frustrations on her inability to fight back. At first, at least--apparently she started to learn some manner of defense, and over the same painful weeks (which turned into a few months), Sakajin’s time went from a minute to two, then to five. Eventually, she was able to hold her own (somewhat) for nearly five to ten minutes at a time. But Grievous, she knew, was barely using his skill against her.

It still felt like progress. She started learning how to parry, how to block, how to use the once-useless skills from her dual race to her advantage. The air would vibrate just before he struck her, a moment of hissing that she could slowly learn to predict, if only slightly. It was one of the only times in her life that Sakajin felt grateful that she wasn’t just human.

“You’re improving,” Grievous had hissed on one particularly strange day, when Sakajin could feel like she was starting to get the hang of it, starting to have some manner of resistance against the General’s rather questionable use of sparring as a method of stress control, probably. “You’re starting to prove a slight inconvenience at last.” She didn’t know if he meant it as a compliment, or out of surprise that she was actually able to defend herself. 

Regardless, Sakajin took it for face value. She did her best to keep improving--it meant that she’d hurt less. And it also meant, if only slightly, that she could use the very same sessions of sparring to funnel out her own aggravation. She used them to push out her anger, her annoyance, every little bottled up feeling that she couldn’t find an outlet for. Whether the general realized she was doing the same as him, Sakajin never figured out. 

It didn’t matter all that much.

* * *

It had been nearly a full year since Sakajin had met Grievous. She had since fallen into a new schedule, balancing the duties of her mechanical job and unofficial sparring amusement of the general. Count Dooku never confronted the fact that she had started having less and less time for her primary job, which was odd in itself. But he never talked all that much about it. The only time he ever did, it was a short, light compliment when she had been summoned into the conference room and caught the last moments of he and Grievous discussing something political. He had later tasked her with more menial work on some droid squadron who needed repairs, but he begun the conversation with just a moment of surprise--a moment that left as fast as it came.

“I’ve heard that you have some talents as a fighter; do continue honing them.”

It surprised Sakajin that he never seemed to defend her--not so much in a fatherly way, but in the sense that he had been her boss and employer--he hired her to be a mechanic, and didn’t seem all that angry or surprised that Grievous had taken her away from a lot of what she was supposed to be doing. She was never scolded for missing deadlines, primarily those that came in conflict to the days that Grievous had her in the sparring room. It didn’t make any sense--and soon, Sakajin had felt silly for thinking that the Count would do anything to save her from General Grievous’ odd ideas of punishment. Or training? 

She didn’t understand the point of getting beat up a little less with every painful day sparring with him. It didn’t exactly serve a purpose. But Sakajin didn’t argue after the second or third week, knowing fully well it did nothing to help. Instead, she started finding an interest in learning more--even outside the sparring, she had started scouring the ship’s database for anything that could help her. She used spare metal rods acting as a mock weapon as she begun to practice stances and moves she manage to learn from the database--even going so far as to spend hours of her own time trying to perfect blocks, how to jump away from a strike without nearly breaking her hips or wrists.

The fighting finally started to have a purpose. Not one to Grievous--Sakajin never understood his mind than she did the mind of any other leader she met, even if briefly. The purpose was for herself. Her life as a mechanic was peaceful and monotonous. She never realized what it felt like to work towards something, to fail constantly and find a reason to get better from the insults and pain that came from being a failure at fighting.

It became a hobby for her, and then, a reason to keep improving every day.

* * *

It seemed that Grievous wasn’t the only one to notice her shift in attitude. She was taking a moment to herself in one of the hangars, leaning against the railing and enjoying the hum of the droids below when Sakajin was approached from behind. She felt it before she heard--the steps against the metal the shift of moving cloth. The mechanic realized that it wasn’t Grievous before she even turned her head to see who it was, though her pounding heart and wide eyes were instinct at that point, fearful that he’d drag her to the sparring room at the most inopportune of moments, when she was finally taking a moment to relax with her own thoughts. 

But, thank the stars, it wasn’t him. But it surprised her just as much to see Count Dooku staring down at her. She instantly stiffened and pressed her arms to her sides, expression pricking up to a firm, blank look.

“Count Dooku, sir!” She exclaimed, waiting for him to ask why she was there or, at least, give her another task to add to the list back in the workroom. Instead, he stepped beside her, glancing down at the ships below the walkway. Sakajin only felt more intimidated by his silence, briefly wondering if the time had come--she was going to be punished for something or another. Had he caught wind that she was practicing in her own time? Was she not allowed to do that when Grievous wasn’t forcing her to spar?

The thoughts were a storming frenzy, only stopped by the sound of the Count’s voice.

“I’ve heard about your improving combat skills.” It was a statement. Not a question, nor something that he wanted Sakajin to confirm. It was just a fact that he knew--probably from various different sources that she had never knew existed. But the most frightening thing was that Sakajin didn’t know if he was pleased by that information or not. He had hired her to be a mechanic. He had done her mother a favor by giving her a life off the street, though he still had neglected to tell Sakajin anything about her mother, nor why he had a favor yet to give. 

She tensed up further, slowly turning around and facing the railing again, but not daring to lean on them. 

“The general tells me that you’re actively learning how to defend yourself.” Another statement, though Sakajin felt that his words were just a tad warmer. Pleased? It was hard to tell when she was tensed up, unable to pick up on the intricacies of his voice when she wasn’t letting her senses work properly by forcing herself to keep still. Dooku continued. “I can’t say I’m pleased with the loss of your work--but it has been an….unforeseen interest. It is perhaps what is willed by powers greater than myself.” 

She felt a twitch from the obvious disappointment in his first sentence--but genuine shock from the rest. Sakajin didn’t try to ask what he meant though--she was still too worried that anything she said would be taken the wrong way. Taken as disrespect, perhaps. She already had an enemy of Grievous--didn’t didn’t want to give the Count a reason to start disliking her as well.

After a second, the man let out a hum. “Though a path may change, the outcome will always be the same as fate had willed it to be.” It didn’t sound like he was talking to her for that moment--as he brought a hand up to stroke at his chin, as if contemplating something far beyond what she could understand. But that didn’t last for all too long, as the Count turned to look at her. Sakajin froze again, but shared the man’s glance. 

Her heart froze with her body when he said the next sentence.

“You look very much like your mother,” Dooku said, just as curiously as before. “...It seems you share more than just an appearance.” The mention was what finally broke Sakajin’s stature, a curiosity that was overwhelming in the face of a topic she almost never had the opportunity to breach before.

“How am I like my mother?” She could only pray that he’d indulge the question. She knew so little about the woman--little more outside of her family background and name. “She was...she was a fighter too, right?” It wasn’t a topic her father liked to talk about, so Sakajin had heard only rumors about it. About her mother. 

The sounds of the hangar below were the only things filling up the air for a few seconds. The gentle beeps and buzzes of the droids working, like a colony of insects working towards the same goal. 

“She was,” came his only acknowledgement of an answer. “She had a lot of talent that was very...useful. A fellow force-user, even. I....respected your mother.” Before Sakajin could try to pry any deeper, the Count was already transitioning elsewhere, tapping his fingers against the metal bar of the rails as he looked her over. “But if you have any chance of being anything worthwhile, you will need a mentor to guide you. Mere hobbyistic sparring will not ever offer you more than a form of entertainment, as is learning how to use such a half-rate weapon when compared to something more composed and intricate.” 

Sakajin peered at him, deciphering the message until she came out with the realization that he was...complimenting her? Encouraging her? It was hard to tell, but she bowed her head anyway.

“Thank you, sir,” She whispered, drawing her head and eyes back up. His dark, enigmatic eyes caught hers for a few seconds, and she didn’t know if shifting--or breathing--was a good idea under such intense scrutiny. Did she say something wrong to him? Was she supposed to pull herself down, deny that she had an ironic interest in the same fighting that the general had at first forced her to do?

“I’m interested in seeing where you go,” He finally said, in a tone so low and cold that it made the woman shiver. There was no denying that there was something else in the older man’s gaze--something that she couldn’t begin to understand. 

But then, the moment passed, and the Count’s gaze was as gentle as it had been when she first met him. “Just make sure that the fine general doesn’t cause enough injury to keep you from your duties, little one.” He turned and started walking away, closing the conversation as abruptly as it began, leaving Sakajin to wonder what the point was--he didn’t give her a task. Hell, he didn’t even ask her much of any questions, just informed her that her fighting was….good? 

Interesting. Her fighting, or rather, her ability to fight at all seemed….interesting. Sakajin started to wonder if there was some hidden meaning behind the word that she should feel worried about, because she didn’t feel all that complimented or proud of herself when she let herself think about the conversation for the rest of the day. She had some deep, nagging feeling in her stomach that the conversation wasn’t random nor insignificant. Something was coming, and she could only attempt to predict what that might be.

But at least she learned something intriguing about her mother. The woman had been a fighter--did that mean she had used a lightsaber? From experience, most force-users wielded a lightsaber; so did that mean that Sakajin’s mother had as well? 

Too many questions. Too much worry. Too many things that Sakajin didn’t need to think about--all she wanted to do in the first place that morning was to forget about her bruises and fear, but instead she was left to a sleepless night thinking about what significance there was in her connection to the mechanic’s long-missing mother. A woman that Sakajin didn’t even know anything about.

Well, a little less than anything now.


	3. Warriors Don't Fear Change

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sakajin learns something that makes her fear for her future.

_The Clone Wars._

That is what people had started calling it.

Even on a ship in the farthest reaches of space from the cultural hub of the Galactic Republic, rumor and word spread fast when a war had officially begun. When lines of territory were drawn, and both allies and enemies were made apparent in less than the blink of the proverbial eye. It came as no honest surprise to most, or at least, not to Sakajin. She had been part of the faction who had been preparing for war for years before. The question had never been IF there would be a war, but WHEN the strings of tension would finally snap.

Sakajin celebrated her 18th birthday three weeks before the first battle on Geonosis. Though, honestly, it wasn't much of a birthday by then to her. Not because she had nobody to celebrate it with, but because she'd long forgotten the actual day she was born and simply started going off the date that the Count had taken her in when she was just barely a young adult.

Two years in an orphanage did that; why would one bother spending the energy to remember that sort of thing anyway? Not Sakajin, apparently, though she did regret knowing at least that personal fact about herself. She was, more or less, 18 years old.

18 years old when the war began. And even for someone so young, relatively speaking, she found no surprise when the first battle broke out, or when her need as a mechanic was suddenly called upon with more frenzy and chaos than it ever had been before.

She no longer repaired droids, simply because there were so many coming in and going out of the Black Halo that it would hardly make a difference if she fixed one, only for a shipment of another hundred come in. At that point, it wasn't even worth it. Just recycle the metal and scrap.

Instead, the young mechanic had become quality control. She was the one who toured the new platoons that were assigned to the ship, making sure every single droid was without a concernable flaw in the eyes of the 'Separatist Cause' as Dooku had put it in his brief. Concernable. It made things sound as if there was a margin of error that was allowed. That certainly wasn't the case.

Feh. Concernable flaw.

Everything was an issue, everything was a problem. One loose bolt, if she missed it, would be nothing but pain funneled through her still-ongoing sparring with Grievous, if he ever picked it out. It happened rarely, but often enough that Sakajin always had some bruise that was tender to the touch on her body somewhere.

Of course, one could believe that her sparring hadn't lessened. If anything, it had increased.

Not her skill-oh, that improvement was marginal-but her time spent sparring? That was another story. Personal time was kept to a minimal, sometimes just enough so that the woman could fall into an uneasy, exhausted sleep in her personal quarters, then wake up to the sharp alarm going off beside her bed, an alert that Grievous was summoning her again.

The cycle had become chaos.

Quality control. Spar. Eat. Sleep. Repeat.

Honestly, she didn't even feel like calling herself a mechanic was even appropriate anymore; Sakajin couldn't honestly remember the last time she had actually 'fixed' a droid, or even tinkered with some scrap parts. And seriously, with a war going on, she was absolutely appalled that Grievous still had time to torture her in his one-sided sparring matches. But thank the stars that she had, at least slightly, improved.

She would have loved to say it was because of her own wit. That the universe had shown her in a dream, or her inhuman instinct in sensing movement and vibrations in the air had finally turned into some sort of super-power. But absolutely none of that was true. She no more taught herself the new combative skills than she taught herself how to speak Ryl: she didn't.

General Grievous taught her the skills keeping her from becoming spotted in bruises and burns. Yes, as surprising as it was for her, the droid general had somehow, through his bitter insults and mocking compliments, had managed to teach her several useful techniques, stances and skills. But there was only one thing more surprising than that: the skills worked. Sakajin could actually use them, make them as fluid in her clunky, in-progress fighting style and make herself better.

Imagine that.

* * *

Parry, block, side-slash. Block, roll to the right.

The heat came close to her leg when her body somersaulted, but not close enough to hurt that time. But her tail was another matter; no pain, but that smell was harsh enough to make the woman scrunch her face up in disgust, even in the heat of battle. There was nothing worse than the scent of burning fur.

She landed with some ease on her feet, off-balance for a moment, but keeping upright, body moving on instinct alone to pull herself back into a ready stance, like a rubber-band bounding back into it's original shape after being stretched.

He rushed at her like a freightship at full speed, but Sakajin sensed it, and sensed exactly where his last step would put him, and she reacted appropriately. Months before, she would have jumped away again, feeling only panic in how quickly the strike came flying towards her head. Months before would have seen a Sakajin who didn't know how she could still block the strikes without succumbing to every ounce of the general's weight.

That's how well the skills had improved her.

She blocked his strike at an angle so she could counterbalance the end of her electrostaff contacting the lightsaber with the opposite end, thereby focusing the pressure evenly to her arms, back, and legs. To some degree, even the counterweight of Sakajin's tail helped, just enough mass to give her body the one second it needed to fluidly move into the next step of the dangerous, intricate, complicated dance.

With one sharp snap of a sound from her electrostaff, Sakajin twisted, kicking her body up with one solid push from her powerful legs. The motion sent her, leg outstretched, leaping towards her target: Grievous' chest. It was the center of his mass. If she could land one solid blow, it would be enough to force him back, maybe even knock the general off balance.

But the woman had made an error by the rashness of her judgement.

Grievous was proficient with up to two lightsabers at a time. She was only keeping one blocked by the push of her body's weight and the strength of her jump. Just because he had been using only of his weapons since the beginning of their match, it didn't mean he couldn't use the second.

Which he did. Painfully so.

The following four or five seconds was a blurr, a painful muddling of colors and sounds that left the girl laying on the metal floor of the sparring arena, holding one of her legs up to her chest, and almost whimpering at the long, stinging burn up the side of her thigh, almost to the hip. Her electrostaff clattered to the ground in what was the end of that match.

Sakajin didn't honestly know what was worse at that point; the pain in her leg from the strike of Grievous' lightsaber, or the burning disappointment in herself that had already started to gnaw on the edges of her mind. She had seen a false openning, taken the bait that he had wanted her to see, knowing fully well that the younger fighter had a tendency to rush in without thinking her technique through.

It was one of the reasons Sakajin knew her skills were still very, very sloppy.

By the time she had pulled herself back up to her feet (leaning on her good leg, but steady nonetheless), Sakajin could feel her superior's glare like a knife. She waited for his insults.

"You move like a child," he growled. Her head was bent low, but she could hear him stalking around her, like a beast waiting for the right moment to pounce upon dying prey. "Without any thought to the consequences; have you no sense of what it means to be a warrior?"

"..." She stood, silent, unsure if the question was hypothetical.

"Talk, girl!"

Apparently not. Sakajin winced as his voice rose.

"I...I do." She said, if only for the sake of giving him an answer, even if she didn't entirely understand what he meant. His sneer, an audible noise of disgust, rumbled in the air of the room.

"No, you do not."

Sakajin's body froze when she felt, rather than heard him approach her. His footsteps were heavy, but rhythmic, getting closer with each one; she could feel it through the metal floor.

Step. Step. Step

"A warrior knows his enemy," He whispered. The sound was barely a foot from her head, and Sakajin knew that if she moved her head even a millimeter, she'd brush one of her frond-like ears up against his mask; and that only terrified her enough to keep so locked up and still that her muscles hurt. Her leg screamed, burning and stinging in what rivaled some of her worse lightsaber-induced injuries. Grievous neither noticed nor cared about how the girl was fairing to his intimidation. He just continued to growl. "He knows them as well as he knows himself; their strengths, their weaknesses. The fact that you could forget so easily that I am a fully-trained fighter in using multiple lightsabers is….disappointing."

The word stung. Grievous always managed to say it in such an odd sort of way; the kind where it felt like a knife was slowly jamming into her chest. Disappointing. Oh, but he didn't leave it there. The general was never one to leave an insult so plain.

"I've even been using two of them for the last several sparring sessions between us." Grievous finally backed off from Sakajin, but the proximity didn't make her feel more comfortable with lowering her guard. "I would think someone so highly praised as a mechanic would be intelligent enough to figure that I'd continue using the same number of weapons."

The knife was in her chest. It was white-hot, searing at every little nerve enough that it made the injury to her leg feel like nothing more than a little singe. It wasn't so much a blow to her pride, sinceSakajin didn't have all that much left, but it sure did make her feel like crap. More than usual, at least. Her intelligence was the one thing that kept her alive, and there was something belittling, something so instinctively painful with that intelligence being put up for a verbal slaughter.

Sakajin didn't like feeling ignorant, dumb, or feeble. Grievous often made her feel like all of the above.

He seemed to enjoy it, most days.

"It was a simple mistake," Sakajin said, too low to be firm, but too firm to be a whisper. She was already risking a smack of his hard, metal hand by her wording, but she didn't want to let him steal away something that made her intrinsically _her._ "It won't happen again, General." She had her head bent, but Sakajin wasn't cowering. Even when she had every ounce of her body bruised and cut up, she made the choice never to cower, never to beg.

Grievous didn't say anything; not at first. He paced, stepping over to where Sakajin's weapon had fallen onto the ground. The ends had turned off, leaving the crystal cores visible within their cage, a gentle glow of pink as they waited for the push of their ignitor so they could burst to an electrical life once more.

The droid general stared at the weapon for a few moments, turning it over in his hands.

He dropped it with a hard, loud crash to the floor. The noise was loud enough that it made the air shake around Sakajin's head, which in turn made her flinch. Grievous didn't notice her movement, but strode back to stand in front of her, hands behind his back, and his eyes staring into her own.

"It better not," He said, slow, and threatening. "The last thing that I need is to have a dim-witted girl trailing behind me all the time. The last thing I desire is to hear the Count's disappointment when you get shot for not being observant."

"...I don't think I'm going to get shot on the Black Halo," Sakajin murmured, not sure if she was trying to talk back to him or not-the exhaustion in her tone muffled a lot of the kick if she was. But, being one not to bring undo pain (usually, since it always seemed to find her anyway), the girl tacked on a quick, "Sir." at the end of her sentence.

Grievous stared at her a moment. His eyes, golden, held a look of...surprise? Amusement? Whatever the expression was, it honestly unnerved Sakajin, who didn't know why her response would get that expression. It didn't help that she was within his reach if he wanted to haul her off her feet by the collar.

"Ah," The General purred mockingly. "It doesn't seem that Dooku informed you of some rather important details."

"Details?" Sakajin asked. Her heart didn't know if it should freeze or start thundering in her chest-what sort of fear should she be feeling? What did Grievous know that she didn't? That was enough to make the woman's blood run cold, already thinking the worst of what he could possibly mean. Grievous must have been in a relatively good mood, because he didn't linger on the moment.

Grievous reached into the shadows of his cloak, returning his lightsaber to a pocket before letting the material fall back around his form like a shroud. "You've been assigned to a mission with me," he said, tone as matter-of-fact as the general could be, but seasoned still with a sense of hostility. Belittlement. "To a base on the edge of Separatist-controlled space."

"What would I need to do there?" Sakajin asked, absolutely befuddled for her worth at such a place. The question was abrupt, but her confusion seemed just, as Grievous didn't berate her for her tone being so firm. "I'm a mechanic who specializes in droids-Is there a droid factory there?"

The silence that fell between the two was thick and awkward-moreso on Sakajin's end, much to her dismay. The question seemed completely relevant, but she didn't understand why he was staring at her with eyes that didn't seem to understand what she meant. But then, something seemed to click for the General.

And he laughed.

"I wonder if the Count is taking pleasure in your ignorance," The general said. "I would not put it past him, though I would have broken the news to you more...appropriately if I had known your lack of….information."

He was talking about things that went straight over the mechanics head. She narrowed her eyes at him, leaning her body just enough so that her leg started to scream in fresh pain from the burn on her thigh. She winced, and Grievous watched her twisting expression of muted pain for another second before finally breaking the news she still had yet to understand.

"You are not coming to the planet as a mechanic. I hardly think you would find much use for yourself even if you did," He paused, and stepped closer. Too close, encroaching within her bubble of personal space that was still intact, eyes and mask hovering several inches from her own as he finished the sentence in a raspy, low growl. "-my little, foolish apprentice." He backed away after letting the words sink in, and his tone of voice shifted back into what it normally was; just a little less of a growl. "The Count's logic is far different than my own, it seems. Perhaps even a sick sense of humor."

It took a second for the woman to absorb the information.

' _-my little, foolish apprentice.'_

When she finally did understand what he was actually _saying,_ her stomach started to knot up. It didn't make any sense, certainly not to her, despite all that she'd been surprised with before in her life. It certainly made her blood run like ice, her limbs stiff and leg aflame with pain.

Apprentice?

She'd call him a superior, yes, but not a master. Fighting had become a mandatory hobby, in the loosest sense, due simply to the convenience that she wasn't a droid and didn't come with as much of a worry of breaking. She was just a punching bag. And suddenly, for what seemed like no reason at all, she was being called an apprentice. A student. Learner beneath a master.

The woman felt the sudden need to correct him, despite the fear of backlash. She _needed_ to make sure that it had only been a miscommunication-because that word, simple as it was, brought on so many cascading meanings that a mere burn on her leg was only the tip of her issues that could come forth from it. Her life wouldn't be so simple anymore, and Grievous wouldn't be just a superior any longer.

"Sir," She said, taking a step forward, all four of her eyes wide with horror that she couldn't hide. "There has to be some mistake. I'm not an apprentice to anything but mechanics-I can't be-I-" It was like trying to tell a computer that one plus one equaled three. It simply didn't run through any form of logic that Sakajin held dear to her. She held her hands up, fingers unfurled and palms up, not knowing what else to do with them anymore in the heavy layer of confusion that settled over her vision and thoughts.

Being an apprentice meant being forced to do whatever he willed, whatever deemed important to teach her. Being an apprentice meant being a warrior, with no choice in the matter.

Being an apprentice meant she had a far, far higher chance of dying.

Sakajin didn't want to die.

She stepped closer still, her confusion blocking out most other thoughts in her mind that would have otherwise told her to keep some distance from the general-but she didn't have the sense to listen. She just wanted to know why. Why? Didn't she have the free will to agree to something that would control the rest of her life?

Those were the questions she would have asked, had the woman's brain thought of them with a little more clarity. But she didn't get the chance to get them out from her mouth-

With a flash and a sizzle, she froze. A lightsaber hummed inches from the bottom of her chin, threatening to hit her throat if she so much as leaned forward. And Grievous snarled, his eyes sharp and hard, obviously finding some end to his tolerance of her questions.

"Accept your new place in life so _graciously_ given to you," He said, so low and cold that it made Sakajin shiver despite the lightsaber at her throat. "Or accept a slow, miserable death. My lightsaber is still on low power, _apprentice_." She finally backed away, slowly, still shaking from fear and anxiety for a decision about her life that she had been given absolutely no choice in. No forewarning, no idea, and it meant that everything else in her life would have to crumble beneath her feet. Being an apprentice meant she wouldn't be allowed the constant, safe walls of the Black Halo. "I could easily take this shift in power and declare you unfit to learn beneath me. And I don't think you'd be breathing long enough to complain to Count Dooku about it."

Sakajin took in a breath and held it. He didn't leave any room to argue.

She couldn't pretend she was an innocent bystander in a war anymore; as Grievous' apprentice, it meant she'd be a student to it, learning combat as a fighter along with whatever other skills her master wanted her to learn. She'd have little to no choice.

But why Grievous?

Why anyone?

Though it seemed so annoying and repetitive to anyone, Sakajin found herself just asking that simple, little question in her head-because it didn't make any sense. And for a woman whose entire career and life to that point depended on understanding little, minor details or risk destroying days upon weeks of work, having the answer to that question withheld wasn't something she could get over with a sigh and a shrug of her shoulders. Especially when it stole away from her everything she found comfortable and happy.

For years, Sakajin had spent her life on the ship, growing complacent and happy with her new life. Grievous had done plenty to knock the sense of normalcy around, but she still found a joy in knowing she had a solid job and a bed to return to every night-a bed that was always in the same place.

It was a safe bet to say that Sakajin didn't like change. She already had too much in her life and, maybe stupidly, assumed she had already gotten her share of it when Dooku took her in.

She wasn't sure what to feel about it, or even if she _could_ feel something about it yet. The information was so new and so appalling that it was like trying to get power from an overloaded outlet.

Well, she could at least feel pain, and there was a lot of it coming from her leg; when the adrenaline from the news started to wear thin, the burning, stinging pain managed to wiggle its way through her thoughts and bring her to the ground and on her tail. Her leg simply couldn't take anymore weight without giving out, but she was already left dumbfounded enough that sitting on the ground meant all the same as standing up.

A soft sizzling sound hummed through the air as Grievous' lightsaber blade disappeared. He put it back in his cloak and stood above her-his form looked even more terrifying from her angle.

"We will continue our training tomorrow. See a medical droid about your leg," There was no sympathy in his words, no care in his tone. "If you choose not to, I can guarantee our trip will be far more painful than it would be otherwise. For you, of course."

Sakajin sat there in a daze, letting her worry begin to morph with her pain, try to absorb the gallons and gallons of worry and anxiety that flooded into her. Though she noticed exactly what he told her, it wasn't until the general had turned and started walking out of the room that her mind finally came together for the first genuine, non-denial question that popped into her thoughts.

"When am I going to get a lightsaber?"

Grievous stopped. He turned, golden eyes shining even through the slight darkness near the doorway of the room, where there were far fewer lights. He had no mouth, no visible features to speak of, but even Sakajin felt as though he was smiling at her.

It wasn't a good smile. In fact, Sakajin could have sworn she felt the feeling in the air shift again, just for a moment. Tense and thick.

"Let's see if you can get that far in training," The cyborg said, in a voice too soft and curious that seemed too similar to the whisper of a nightmare. "I don't particularly like to waste pieces in my collection."

And then he left. The door shut behind him, leaving Sakajin on the floor to collect her thoughts on how in barely ten minutes, everything in her life had flipped upside down. Her thoughts were chaos, her anxiety was through the roof, and the pain from the burn in her leg had swallowed up the whole limb, even almost up to one side of her hips.

But even still, after several minutes of mulling through the growing weight of misery, Sakajin lifted herself back onto unsteady feet, and took the time to put her electrostaff back against the wall before limping out of the room, and to the direction of the small medical bay.

Like it or not, she was General Grievous' apprentice. She'd rather be stranded on another planet, forced to work near the engine bays, anything but the fate she was given. It changed so much of her future that she couldn't begin to think about what was going to happen to her.

Apprentice was a big word that meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people. To her, from what she'd learned of the word, that meant that General Grievous wansn't just her superior anymore. Instead, he was her master, and she his student. It meant that she wasn't just expected to entertain him anymore with sparring, but legitamately learn how to fight. It meant Sakajin had to take a far more active role in the war, whether she liked it or not. And...well, whatever else Grievous wanted her to do. As an apprentice, wasn't just a punching bag. She was going to be trained as a warrior instead.

But Sakajin wasn't a warrior.

She was scared, and worried for what the coming weeks would bring.


	4. Hypocrite

Somewhere along the line, Sakajin was sure her mental image of the mission had shifted.

_Touring a base on the edge of Separatist-controlled space._

That had been what _Master_ Grievous had described it originally. But Sakajin couldn't be sure, since the entirety of that day felt like a thick smoke after learning of her forced change in position. Despite her asking a time or two more afterwards, he never gave much more information beyond that. She stopped after the second time, when he threatened to throw her over the catwalk. He sounded angry enough to mean it, though, he always sounded angry enough to mean most things to begin with.

Somewhere between the first day of being told and the third day of preparations, Sakajin had begun to imagine the base being on the edge of a battle, in the middle of some stalemate against a nearby Republic-held base. There would be canons, battalions, hordes of droids; there would even be weapons at the ready for any oncoming onslaught. It was a vibrant mental image, ripped straight from a holomovie (sound effects, cheesy action and all). It was exciting to think about at least, and kept her busy for the most part when Grievous was off talking to Dooku, and she was left in her old-workroom to tinker with scrap droid pieces. Perhaps the mental shift came from boredom, or perhaps it was just the need to make the mission feel as though it was important.

As fantastical as Sakajin had made it sound to herself, it was nice to be proven so very inaccurate in the end. Going into combat was no longer an IF question, but WHEN, and finding out her first day on a battlefield was postponed felt like a breath of relief. It was always reassuring to find out that she wouldn't be on the opposite end of a blaster anytime soon.

The base itself was on a densely-forested moon of Ukiato, it's home planet with little worth of it's own (from what Sakajin had heard Grievous say). It was so densely forested, in fact, that Sakajin couldn't even recall seeing more than a few large bodies of water on the descent to the surface. No oceans. Just….thick, multi-shaded patches of green; maybe even brown in the spots where hills or smaller mountains broke past the thick canopy. Even the base itself looked invisible beneath the towering trees until the small ship got closer. And it wasn't until then, when the ship lowered beyond the treetops, that Sakajin realized how tall the trees were.

They were absolutely gargantuan-taller than the buildings on Coruscant, if felt like. Since it was not only hidden beneath the treetops, but also tucked into the side of a low mountain, it was the perfect spot (strategically-speaking) to hide a base. But there weren't any weapons, and the crew that ran the base itself seemed very skeletal-perhaps a couple dozen squads of battle droids for a building that, Sakajin felt, could have been the size of a large mansion home on her planet.

Purely a survey post, created solely for the use of monitoring enemy space. But that hardly concerned her. As long as they weren't in an ongoing battle zone, Sakajin couldn't care any less what the base was used for.

It had little in terms of amenities. Since the war-force of the CIS didn't really have a living army, it meant that they barely had to spend any extra money on them. No entertainment. No specific food services. Nothing. It didn't really bother Sakajin, not at first.

The first half of the day was spent walking through the halls, trailing after Grievous like the obedient, little apprentice she'd been forced to be not even three days prior. The head battle droid who was leading the tour was happy to spout off numbers, coordinates and location information that Grievous seemed interested in, but Sakajin, sadly not. It was for the best, since it kept him occupied, and her without a reason to put up much of a fuss for the first few hours.

She kept herself occupied with staring out the windows they passed in various hallways. The base, although small, seemed perfectly placed in the densest, most beautiful part of the never-ending forest. The treetops covered nearly everything in shadow, an oddly bright twilight that was otherwise supplemented by what little sunlight scattered through the leaves to hit the forest floor. It was far unlike the Black Halo, and even further unlike Coruscant.

Never before had the woman remembered seeing so much green in the world after leaving her home planet nearly a decade before.

It almost reminded her of Ev'ren, in fact. Though it wasn't a complete twilight, the darkened air brought back memories of Karinu, the city she was born in. Wheres some districts were covered in thick, jungle-like forests as their natural environment, Karinu had been a bit sparser in it's foliage. The trees were a bit thinner, the grass a bit taller.

The moon wasn't nearly as hot as Ev'ren though; even after layering up with a robe, a chill still nipped at the tips of Sakajin's fingers and fronds alike. Not enough to freeze water, judging by the ice-less greenery outside the thick-glass windows, but cold enough for her to notice. Cold enough to make her uncomfortable, but she did plenty to keep her shivering from her new master's notice. She didn't want to risk any of his ire, or worse, his taunting.

Maybe it had something to do with the non-human parts of her biology. Tarael, as a whole, were a lot more sensitive to the cold from what she could recall from her childhood. They had evolved on a hot, tropical, twilight planet after all. The moon looked similar enough, and that was enough to curb Sakajin's boredom of not being able to do anything but follow Grievous around and listen to things even she had no understanding of.

The tour came to an eventual close, a cycle-around the entire facility, right into the main computer room where dozens of droids seemed to be working at a silent, tireless pace. The main screen, almost a story high, flickered with a map of the surrounding solar system. The smaller computers had garbled numbers and languages that Sakajin couldn't begin to decipher. Just like several of the navigation and weapons rooms within the Black Halo-something else that was familiar, even if the language itself was unreadable on the various screens.

She stood at the doorway while her master, Grievous, strode through the room to make his own observations of their productivity. He growled at the battle droid that had given the tour of the base after a few moments, words too low for the apprentice to pick up, but the half-excited, half-terrified beeps and whirred words from the droid itself seemed to be plenty of an indication that Grievous was either very please, or very angry. Since the droid didn't lose his head, Sakajin had to guess that her master was pleased with what he had been looking for in the post. Whatever that was to begin with, he hadn't exactly enlightened her with.

Sakajin was probably there just to take up space. Grievous hadn't actually given her any sort of weapon yet, and considering what he had told her at their last sparring match, she wouldn't have been surprised if she never got one at all. Electrostaves were her specialty, if experience was anything to count from the past year or so of using one-but when she had tried to bring one herself, Grievous had taken it right out of her hands as she was walking onboard the transport ship.

"You won't be needing this," He had growled, giving her no time to argue or question his level of judgement before tossing the modified weapon to one of the battle droids who had been prepping the ship.

It didn't make any sense to her, but Sakajin was long-past trying to question the orders of her new master.

Speaking of master, Sakajin was abrubtly yanked from her thoughts by the sound of his rough voice.

"Girl," He growled from the center of the room, beckoning her close with his hand. Sakajin sighed and obeyed the unspoken order, stepping down towards where the droid general stood; with the other droid long-gone, it was just him and her standing there. The hard stare of his golden eyes almost gave her chills, and he had barely spoken three total words to her in the last three hours.

She awaited his further orders, tentatively keeping her guard up in both the emotional and physical sense. Just as he was likely to lash out at her in some form of disappointment, he was just as likely to lash out with a change in schedule, a surprise sparring session; just about anything. Simply put, it would bode well for any apprentice of General Grievous' to be on their toes for whatever he had to say.

"You are dismissed for the day, apprentice," Is what he finally said, waving his hand in a similar, dismissing motion. "You will be shown to your quarters."

The confirmation of the order came in the form of him turning around and striding right out of the room, leaving the woman herself to figure out if it was a trick or not. She stood there for a few seconds, wide-eyed and confused, but it felt like hours. When her master never returned, Sakajin felt like she could leave the room without repercussions, but only after hurrying to the doorway Grievous had stepped out of to ensure he wasn't actually standing on the other side, waiting for her to make a mistake.

The last thing she wanted was to fail a trick test and feel that failure twice as hard in a low-power lightsaber strike to the shin. Or the side. It hurt no matter where it fell, honestly.

Once assured that her master had meant what he said, Sakajin turned around to face the center of the room once more. She was startled by the battle droid who had come up behind her, enough that she actually jumped back a little bit and felt her heart skip a beat.

"Shall I show you to your room?" it inquired in monotone. Sakajin merely nodded her head in agreement, thinking nothing of the offer. The droid beeped in acknowledgement, then turned to start leading her out of the room nad through the base itself. She didn't know where her master was staying, nor did she have much care to know.

The only bit of information that was pertinent in the end was the case of a sparring room (or any open space that could be used for the same purpose). Logic dictated that something of the sort wasn't a worry, because one, they were only staying at the post for a day and a half; and two: because Sakajin didn't even have a weapon she could use to spar with.

Grievous had a rough personality. Sakajin doubted that anyone could get along with him. However, even being as tough and merciless as he was, the general was not without some honor in how he did things, particularly when it came to sparring. Yes, he had a genuine, constant advantage over her in both skill and experience, but there was never truly a time where he attacked her without letting the apprentice have some form of weapon first. Sometimes they were crappy weapons, but they were weapons nonetheless.

The fact that she had none, and that the base wasn't at all built to house fighters, was enough to calm her senses down so she could continue with her curious eye-wandering gaze across all the windows she and her guide passed on the way to her room.

When the droid finally stopped, it gestured to a small door on one side of the hallway, marked only by a few alien letters that looked identical to some from the computer room.

She stepped inside without further instruction, and hearing the door click behind while her eyes took in the humble, organized attempt at a bedroom prepared for her. It obviously wasn't originally a room meant for someone to sleep in. Everything was metal, and there were several odd, sharp corners in the walls, leaving the room itself in a completely odd shape. The bed itself had a single pillow and a thin comforter, laid over an equally thin-looking mat on the floor. It wasn't luxury, but who was Sakajin to complain in the first place?

Her room in the Black Halo was a little more homely because it had been lived-in. A few more trinkets, self-made shelves, and even a thin carpet she'd managed to get from an ambassador who held some shallow fondness for her at some point in her young adulthood (she couldn't remember much about him).

There was a bed, and that was enough to get her through the night. But of course, Sakajin didn't have any intention of sleeping, there were still plenty of hours worth of daylight left on the moon before the sun would fade off into the horizon. She didn't intend to waste any of them being cooped up in a small, cramped room without anything to entertain her.

After looking around the room to see if there was anything worthwhile, like a computer, database or anything similar. Finding nothing, Sakajin left the room to search for something more interesting; considering the scenery outside, she wondered if it was possible to walk outside for a bit. The mere idea of seeing an actual environment was enough to make her practically claw at the windows, but since she'd been with Grievous all morning, the desire was quite easily restrained. Without him around, Sakajin felt even more contained. She could see the forest outside, but didn't know the base's layout at all enough to know if there was a door or accessway that lead outside.

She wandered the halls at first, keeping to the outermost edge of the complex, just so she could always see the windows over one shoulder. But eventually, as luck would have it, her wandering had her crossing path with an unknown battle droid.

"B-1 Battledroid," Sakajin said, getting the droid's attention with the command she knew all too well. "Is there any way out of the base?"

The droid tilted its head after a moment, comprehending her request to the complex AI system. "...Do you inquire about an exit?" It asked in turn.

Sakajin hummed, then finally said, "Yes. I'm hoping to see the forest around the base a bit better."

The droid processed her answer. "The southern bay is the closest approximate exit designed for biological and non-biological personnel to the perimeters. However, please take precautions of the wildlife and climate of the moon, as it can fall below the freezing temperature of water at night."

If Sakajin didn't know any better, she almost would have thought it's answer was some sort of pre-recorded warning to anyone who wanted to venture out of the base's thick metal walls, though she could hardly figure out how that made sense (since the base was entirely run by droids). Nevertheless, she waved off it's clinical-level concern, already turning around in the direction she had come originally after being dismissed by Grievous. She recalled the southern bay being in that direction.

"I've been in worse," she muttered to herself, leaving the droid to continue on with whatever it's primary function was once more.

"Roger roger," it beeped in obedient understanding.

The apprentice didn't honestly care all that much about how cold it was outside; it could be freezing for all she cared, species sensitivity be damned. The opportunity to see a planet, an actual planet with trees and grass and everything green again, was a blessing she feared would never come again.

The exit was marked well. In fact, it actually looked like something fairly used. She had almost feared it would be hidden behind other locked doors requiring passwords or proper credentials to get past, like she might find on the Black Halo for some portions of the ship she wasn't allowed any access to.

But there it was, in plain sight, requiring only a scan of one of her eyes to open. She stood beside the door and leaned in enough for the scanner to get the image of one of her main eyes, since it was far easier to get an image of her iris. When it ran through the system without a hiccup, the door itself beeped, then opened without a hitch.

Sakajin practically ran out the door. The level of excitement that built up in her chest was beyond what her body was used to, a lack of experience in a situation she never even had a chance to be in before-she was actually on a planet. There was dirt, actual grass and dirt beneath her feet. And while it was cold, almost enough to cloud up her breath on every exhale, Sakajin could actually breathe clean, fresh air produced from the forest around her and the base.

It was more beautiful than any sunrise or sunset she'd seen on the Black Halo. But that was only the beginning, the first sensation of stepping out of the metal hull of the Ukiato moon base, where there was an entire forest surrounding it from every direction.

She didn't really have a sense of direction in where everything was. The way Sakajin saw it, the base itself had been situated in either a natural or artificially made circular clearing maybe a mile across at most. The base took up a lot of that space, leaving perhaps a dozen or so meters around the perimeter before the trees grew, depending on what entrance she emerged from. Since she came out of the south entrance, the forest's edge was less than a dozen meters. It was easily within sprinting distance for the exuberant apprentice.

She dashed off in the direction of the emerald trees, easily weaving between them as she plunged into the depths of a natural maze of plans she hadn't seen in….years. Coruscant had barely a speck of green anywhere on the lower levels of the city. They were almost always for decoration, which the most prominent being the gardens around the Jedi temple, but those were closed off from the public for most of the year. Sakajin hadn't ever the will or desire to travel that far from her orphanage to see that, especially when she could get better money elsewhere for her services.

The Black Halo had no plants anywhere. The air was chemically created by means she herself didn't know, and she got food packets produced specifically for her-there was no need for large, needy greenery on the ship. So that meant the last time she saw anything similar to the moon's forests was more than a decade prior on Ev'ren.

Ev'ren. It reminded her so much of her home planet. The thick trees, the fresh air, the scent of flowers coming from some direction (Sakajin was too overwhelmed to figure it out more specifically). It was a surge of nostalgia that she couldn't have prepared for, all leading up to her dashing through the forest, touching every tree and leaf before she almost tossed herself onto a soft-looking patch of grass, clear of younger trees.

She was maybe half a mile from the base in the end, caring little about how far she was and littler still about how dangerous it was to be that far. The creatures that lived within the dense green underbrush was as much a mystery as anything else was that pertained to her life and future. Sakajin had always thrived on that uncertainty, moving forward in a situation she never saw the end of. For her whole life, the future was always an uncertainty made normal by how the hand of fate had dealt her cards. It was a shitty hand, but she had long-since learned how to play her cards and still come out even on the other side.

She learned to enjoy what could be enjoyed, and worry only when the situation lay right in her face, covering every inch of her view. There was no middle ground for the apprentice; it was her coping mechanism for life.

And so far, that coping mechanism included a soft, gentle grassy bed beneath her, body laying with limbs spread out on the cool ground. Though the air held a chill, the ground was surprisingly warm, as if the planet itself had sucked all the heat out of the air itself. Every sense of Sakajin's body felt comfortably stimulated by the natural flora surrounding her.

There was the sweet smell of grass and trees, the subtle sound of leaves shifting on a breeze. Even the ground felt as though it was vibrating, barely, in something akin to a heartbeat. Perhaps if she pressed her fronds to the ground and concentrated enough, Sakajin could have felt the soft, subtle footsteps of animals around her. But instead, all she could focus on was her own heartbeat at that point, and how it seemed to interweave with the sounds of small birds calling and echos of mammals far away.

Sunlight trickled down from the thick forest canopy. It was just enough to keep everything lit, a twilight of warmth that rained down onto the grassy earth below, as if the streams of light were vines hanging from the heavens above. Several fell upon Sakajin's body as she lay in her small, grassy bed, just so that combined with the warmth of the ground itself, she felt happy and lethargic.

Nothing could take away the beauty of her experience right then and there. Nothing could steal the wonder that fluttered deep in her chest nor the nostalgia of being in a forest. It made her blood sing, half of her heritage being born from the green, grassy earth.

It was sad, actually.

She was millions upon millions of miles from her real home. She was across an entire galaxy, not even knowing where Ev'ren even was on a map. And yet, despite the fact that she had been forced away and left without knowing where her isolated planet even was, somehow, this random moon off the edge of Separatist-forsaken space felt like home.

It was sad that she was that desperate.

Sakajin ignored the needle in the back of her mind, the haunting feeling of truth that she knew anyone would use to counter her euphoric feelings of joy. In all honesty, it wasn't as if she'd ever get a chance to see Ev'ren again. Not on the path she was on.

She sighed as the thought started to trickle from an unconscious to a conscious worry. Considering the situation, Sakajin often tried not to put labels on sides, nor morals to war. Good guys, bad guys; those were factions that existed in story books. The real world didn't have either of them. They had people who opposed one another with different worldviews, and sometimes someone had more people on their side.

Sometimes Sakajin wondered if that was her way of ignoring the fact that she probably wouldn't ever call Grievous, nor Count Dooku, 'good guys'. Because if she couldn't call them that….then what was she?

It had been so much easier as a mechanic; regardless of her ambiguous standing, she could simply point to someone else and say 'don't blame me, they told me to do it.' She had the luxury of being able to say 'I was just following orders.'

But she wasn't a mechanic anymore. She was an apprentice, a fighter-in-training. Whether she wanted to or not, Sakajin had staked a very active role in the conflict, forced to answer for her conscious decision to take Count Dooku's offer years before. She still didn't know if she made the right one. Her fate, had she remained on Coruscant, was hard to predict or guess at.

Maybe it was just because Sakajin never liked the idea of fighting other people. She didn't like the concept of conflict, nor the idea of taking someone's life. Sure, she enjoyed the thrill of sparring, the rush of adrenaline that came with it (though whether or not that had been ingrained simply to more easily endure training with Grievous, she didn't know).

She wouldn't know for a while. The apprentice wasn't even sure she would see combat, since rational thought had started to work it's way through her mind after taking in the initial shock of her occupation shift. Maybe he'd tire of her, find out that Sakajin just wasn't cut out in life to do anything more than examain droids and turn wrenches. Oh, she could only hope.

She stared up at the sky, green eyes unblinking, and thoughts sluggishly shifting from one thing to the next. For a while, her mind was peaceful and silent, the only thing there being the nagging reminder that she should head back to the base. It was a smart move. She didn't know much about the wildlife, the climate, nor anything else; but Sakajin wanted to be selfish. She wanted to be greedy. She wanted to lay out in the grassy little clearing for as long as she wanted and feel the same sort of freedom she had only felt on Coruscant. Go where you please, do what you want, make your own way.

A feeling started to bloom in her mind. It wasn't really a thought, it didn't come with words or images; it was just a feeling. A feeling of dread and worry, and it came on so suddenly that Sakajin didn't know what to make of it, the emotions hitting her chest like a weight she couldn't shake off.

At first, she thought it was guilt from her decision to be selfish, consciously and actively. But it was too strong, too...deep. It settled inside of her mind like a rock, unmoving as she tried to figure out where it had come from. Dread, tinged with fear. Suddenly, she thought she could hear a sound. It was a sharp, loud alarm, so fast that it felt as if it had been a blip in her own mind.

When Sakajin sat up to listen, unsurprisingly, she heard nothing at all. No alarm. it was only an echo in her head. But the apprentice could have sworn she had heard it. But then, shortly after, the sharp feeling of dread and worry started to fade, and soon did her confusion with the sound of an alarm somewhere echoing through the forest.

In the end, she chalked it up to her own constant worry. Anxiety fueled by years of fear, making her paranoid to even the slightest sounds that could be perceived otherwise. It gave her even more of a reason to stay out of the base, enjoy herself and bask in the warmth of the sun and ground. When was the last time Sakajin had time to relax like that?

In the end, Sakajin didn't know how long she was laying there in the forest. At some point, she knew she had fallen asleep, because when her thoughts finally came too again, the light from above had dimmed considerably. There was still light in the sky, from what her eyes could tell, but it was fading rapidly.

She was starting to get back onto her feet when her sleep-dulled senses started to hear it. The sharp, consistent, blaring noises. It echoed through the forest like a knife, cutting through as a sound so entirely artificial, it put Sakajin on an instant high-alert. Her fronds pricked and her eyes widened as she realized that the noise, the alarm, was coming from the base.

The direction back wasn't clear at first; if the woman hadn't been panicking so much, she could have found the path quicker, noting the slightly visible shape of her footsteps in the grass leading in the direction she'd came. But Sakajin wasn't calm. Her thoughts were going haywire. How long had the alarms been going off? What were they going off for?

Sakajin had only endured the similar sound once in her life aboard the Black Halo. It had been a simple drill, one of the few since the ship itself had been so new. All it consisted off was her taking off down the hall from her quarters and meeting in a designated area, being told that her time was good, and then resuming life as normally as she could.

But that noise wasn't a drill. Of course, it could have been, it could have been something to test the system, or it could have been something else, Sakajin didn't know. But it send her heart racing nevertheless, and she didn't want to be wrong if it was serious.

After a few minutes of mindless pacing and useless glancing through thicket, the apprentice found her way back to the base. She emerged from the forest edge fo find everything in chaos.

Not destructive chaos. There wasn't any smoke, the base wasn't blown open, and there weren't battle droids stampeding across every inch of open land like a hoard moving towards an enemy. Instead, the chaos was in the sky.

There had to be at least a dozen ships in the air, taking off from the launch bay of the base where she had been flown into. Transport ships of all sorts, most of what had been in the bay when Sakajin first arrived, their personal callsigns inscribed on their flank and still easily visible under the light of a setting sun.

Sakajin's heart stopped and her eyes widened when, instinctively, she turned to look in the other direction and see exactly why they were taking off and why the alarm was going off in the first place.

Republic ships, at least two dozen of them, coming in low on the golden horizon of the sky. They were nothing more than dots in the sky, still a minute or two away, but it didn't take a genius to figure out that the base was grossly overcountered. It took her a minute to take it all in, a situation that had been unfolding for a while now forced to compute within just a few seconds into the apprentice's frazzled brain.

The base was under attack, and the alarms had been going off long enough for most of the base itself to be evacuated. And there she was, out in the open while the ships whizzed about above her head.

She faintly caught sight of a number one one of the ships. The same transport ship she'd been on when arriving. It was one of the first to officially take off into the airspace, heading out into the orbital space of the planet, and then (presumably) back to the Black Halo. Grievous was more than likely on that ship (if he hadn't already left, with the rest of the ships merely being decoys). She didn't know.

Sakajin was mostly concerned with the fact that they were up in the air while she, alone, was on the ground. She was by herself. She was, probably by the fault of her own, left abandoned while the Republic forces overtook the pitifully defenseless base without so much as an effort.

There was no time to feel angry, no time to be frustrated in the fact that she was left abandoned, possibly to die, on a planet that was being forcibly taken by the enemy faction. All Sakajin knew is that she was left to her own talents and thoughts to stay alive, so she did what any sensible and logical woman might do when the base was getting overrun by enemy forces:

She ran straight for and into the south entrance of the base.

Honestly, logic only came as part of hindsight for the woman, having such little combat experience. The once-ideallic beauty of a forest that had welcomed her with open arms suddenly seemed as terrifying as the Republic forces themselves. It was dark, and getting cold (she could start to see the puff of her own breaths), with all things accounted for, Sakajin had a better chance of surviving a night if she was able to find a little closet to hide in.

She didn't have a weapon. She barely knew her way around the base itself, and her master had given up on her (she'd expected it, but not honestly in _that_ sort of way).

Panic didn't help her think all that rationally. Sakajin peered from left to right, sprinting down the hallway, searching for the most nondescript room that came into her vision first. She went deeper into the complex of metal halls, no longer able to see the windows that had let her gaze longingly towards the forest only a few hours before. Now, the outside seemed like a deathtrap, and her only hope of being able to get through a night undetected was as deep in the heart of the base as she could get.

There was a door that she missed her first time past a hallway. It was just past a corner, almost unnoticeable unless someone doubled back around and stared at the wall for a while. She debated the choice for a few moments, but when the echoing sounds of voices started to whisper down the hallways, the (ex?) apprentice decided that she didn't have the luxury of time to decide anymore. She punched in the same code that had been used for her room, wondering if that would work.

No dice. She punched it again, just to make sure, and still nothing.

The voices started to get a little louder, a bit clearer. She could start to pick up specific words vibrating on the air, harsh sounds and orders that only meant they were coming her way.

"Red Team 2, down south."

"Copy that Red Leader. Blue Team 1 is east."

"Looks like they left in a hurry."

"Stupid clankers don't even know how to hold down a base."

Sakajin didn't hang around the hallway for much longer.

Tears started to well up in her eyes as the terror became more than what she was able to handle. She was going to die. There was absolutely no doubt in her mind that she was going to die, and it would be all her own fault. Her selfishness effectively killed her. If she had only been in the base when the alarm went off, only known what was going on, maybe she would have been on one of those ships and-

"Did you say the radar catch somethin', Scrap?"

"Yeah. Not droid."

Louder voices. Actually, from what Sakajin could tell, she was starting to run _into_ a new set of voices. She was caught smack between two groups, and they both were coming her way, barring her in a hallway with no chance of escape.

The woman was about ready to shake and fall to her knees, maybe on the possibility that her emotional breakdown of fear might keep them from shooting on-sight, but when she pressed her back to the wall and felt a door, she was whipping around and trying every effort to make it open before she could take in another breath.

"Think they leave someone behind?"

"Maybe. Captive?"

"Why the hell would they have a captive on _this_ base? C'mon, think a little bit with that head a' yours." They were getting closer.

Sakajin's heart was beating so fast that it was almost as if she couldn't hear the singular beats anymore; it was just a constant hum of noise, wooshing in her head, making her fingertips fumble as she finally got the door to accept an eye scan before practically tossing herself inside and forcing it shut behind her.

The room was small. Supply, perhaps, stacked with boxes and shelves of items that would have otherwise proven useless to her if she wasn't so desperate to hide behind _something_. Without much thought and working mostly on instinct at that point, the woman moved into the farthest corner of the room from the door, easily maneuvering around the darkened space after closing her main eyes and letting her secondary set, more easily attuned to darkness and heat, helped her enough to keep from tripping over anything.

It wasn't' a fancy hiding spot. For the most part, Sakajin was hidden only by the shelves and a few boxes that were placed just right to block her from site from the doorway. She curled up tight, arms wrapped around her legs, her tail wrapped around her body, and her fronds pressed so tight to the sides of her head that it muffled her sense of hearing.

At first, there was silence. Cold, dark silence. But it didn't last for very long; soon enough, the voices started getting close enough again that she could start hearing their low rumbling even through the metal door. Not words, just voices.

The fear started to well up again, suffocating the woman as she clutched her legs and willed for the child-like fear to go away, because apparently Sakajin's only response to the possibility of being caught was to start crying. The tears felt heavy and hot as they rolled down her cheeks, stinging her eyes and skin and making everything hurt even more. She didn't want to die, oh god, she didn't want to die.

The first time ever she was technically in a combat situation, and the apprentice was bawling her eyes out like a youngling. What a wonderful first experience. Her mother would be proud.

Her crying, her hiccuping, all of it stopped when Sakajin heard it happen.

The door opened. At that point, Sakajin didn't know if she was supposed to chastise herself for not locking it behind her. She had been too afraid, too saturated in her own self-pity of the situation that something so obvious didn't actually come to her as obvious.

"I swear I heard somethin' in here," came a low, softly static-y voice from the doorway. A voice filtered through the com of a helmet. The accompanying heavy footsteps that the light, metallic clinking told Sakajin that he was armed and armored, though it wasn't as if that was ever in any doubt. The owner of the voice started to approach the opposite end of the room, stepping around the boxes and shelves.

"Could it just have been you?" Someone asked from the doorway. He huffed, then whispered, probably low enough so the soldier in the room couldn't hear, "I think he's gettin' a little paranoid with the promotion."

"You still can't call me deaf though," The searching voice replied tersely. "I'm blind in one eye, but I'm not deaf."

That seemed plenty enough to shut up everyone else. Sakajin held her breath, caring less for the banter than she did about where the man was going inside the room. Apparently, he had searched enough of one side of the room, and she could feel and hear his footsteps coming towards her side. It left her to make a decision.

She would either stay there and cower, or jump out and act like a hero, maybe even have a chance to defend herself to take one of them down with the weight of her body before….

Well. Her options were obvious. So what did she do?

She cowered. Sakajin was overwhelmed with emotions she never expected to get before-the fear alone was enough to paralyze her. She had training to fight, and the willpower to do so. But she had always been given a weapon, and had always had someone else to look at for orders. What a hypocrite she was; ready to stand firm under the scrutiny of Grievous, but ready to curl up when confronted by the enemy for the first time. She was a joke.

She was on an alien world, on an alien base, left abandoned to her own decisions that were already looking out to be pretty shitty.

Sakajin waited to get shot. She waited for death, fear petrifying her from looking up until the lack of a blaster shot to the head was instead substituted with the voice.

"Blue Team Leader, I got someone."

"Friendly?"

"Unknown."

With an obvious shaking in her movement, Sakajin pulled her head up. There was a light, bright and blinding, shining into her face. She covered it up by raising her hand, though it did little to help her see who was behind the light. God, the shadow looked tall from her vantage point. She didn't speak, didn't whimper, and (thankfully) didn't start pleading for her life. At least she could keep that much dignity. But the woman was still shaking, her tear streaks wet on her face, fear making her heart flutter like a bird in her chest.

_Alone. Going to die. Trapped by the enemy. A complete shame to herself and her family name._

The silence between her and the unknown voice was finally broken when he asked her a direct, simple question.

"Identify yourself," He commanded in a light, low voice, stepping closer to her with the light still blinding all of Sakajin's eyes. "Who are you?"

What was Sakajin's response?

She fainted.


	5. Choices

When Sakajin awoke to the sound of a low drone and a dark room, the first thing that flooded her mind was a feeling of panic. Despite the logic of the situation, the anxiety that saturated her mind made her feel suffocated, unable to breathe as the entirety of her situation began to fill her memories once more.

The last thing she could truly remember was accepting the fact that she was all alone on a planet overrun by the forces of the Republic Army. She remembered running, hiding away, and then….nothing. There were voices, but beyond a feeling of terror nothing stuck out in her mind. And so there she awoke in the darkness, the air filled with a noise she couldn't honestly place.

Where was she? Well, any guess was good at that point. The room itself was dark, the only source of light being a dim glow that came from the back of the room. When she tried to stand herself up, something stopped her.

At first, Sakajin thought it was merely a trick of the mind-but all too quickly, it became apparent that the pressure around one of her wrists were not a mere trick of the mind. She couldn't move more than a few steps away from the bed before the hum and pressure of the cuff around her wrist held her from going any farther.

It was an energy cuff, evident in it's soft pink glow that barely lit up the bed and floor beneath the woman's feet. Sakajin cursed under her breath, trying the strength of the restriction with a few sharp tugs of her arm. Neither the cuff itself or its connection to the corner of the bed-frame didn't give any, of course. What was even worse, upon closer inspection, she had neither the tools or the knowledge to fiddle with the piece of tech, maybe even overload and short it out. If Sakajin wasn't already on a constant, base-level of panic at the moment, that sure would have been enough to make her heart-rate spark.

The only thing worse than being locked up in a dark room: being restrained in a dark room. It set every nerve on edge for her, feeling as though she was being pulled in despite logic telling her otherwise. Nevertheless, Sakajin breathed, slowly, and calmed her mind and heart as best as she could.

At least the darkness wasn't much of an issue. She didn't know how long she'd been locked up, but obviously enough her eyes had adjusted to the low-light levels, moreso than an average human. Where a pure-blooded human might only be able to make out faint shapes and shadows in such darkness, she was able to pick out the same level of detail as if someone had lit a small flame in front of her.

The room was small. Barely larger than her quarters back on the Black Halo. There was a bed, a small table, but that was all. The door was on the other side of the room, opposite of both Sakajin and the bed; there was a small sliver of light shining from it, from the bottom crack where it probably lead into some sort of hallway.

There were muffled voices outside, too low for her to pick-up easily, too low to hear the words themselves. The fact that the voices didn't sound aggressive or angered was enough to keep Sakajin from panicking any further. She resigned to her temporary fate in not being able to get out of her restraints, and merely sat on the bed to contemplate on things.

There were many things worth contemplating on. Being alone, being captured. She never once thought in her life she would be a POW, but she had heard plenty of horror stories that her imagination hardly even needed to work for her to feel afraid about what might happen to her.

Well. That was on the possibility that they could discern that she was a fighter. Sakajin hadn't realized it at first in her initial panic, but she hadn't been found with a weapon.

She hadn't been found fighting.

If the positions were entirely switched, who was to say she wasn't a prisoner of the Separatists? It didn't explain her restraints, being locked in a room, or the attempted deprivation of her sight.

Oh, so very much to think about in the absence of anything else to do.

* * *

It must have been an hour that passed while Sakajin waited. For what? For anything, honestly. She was waiting for that door to open, whatever might come from behind it. And after that long, empty, silent hour, the door did open.

The soft, wispy sound of seamless shifting metal was enough to grab her attention. The woman, despite feeling blinded by the light that flooded the room, tried to get a glimpse at the figure that stepped inside.

It was hard to see past all the brightness, but by the weight of the footsteps and the hum that she heard, she could figure that it was a man-and a pretty tall one at that. The door closed behind him and the lights of the room switched on. Though they weren't nearly as bright, the woman's sensitive eyes had at least desensitized themselves enough that it didn't hurt to look at him.

"Imagine our surprise finding someone like you here," A low, amused voice commented from several paces in front of the bed. Sakajin opened her eyes and looked at the owner.

He really was tall. Taller than her, but certainly not as tall as Grievous. Maybe six foot? Sizable and strong, if going by the broadness of his shoulders and the way he held himself. The man was a leader of some sort; Sakajin could pick that out right away.

As she took in more of his appearance, the apprentice began to notice more and more of the details of his amor. It was clone, obviously enough. The design, the symbols, everything down to the shape of the helmet itself was enough to tell her the man was a clone. Sakajin already knew to expect one, so it wasn't like that information in itself was all that surprising.

Before she could even open her mouth to give off either something snarky or genuine (there wasn't enough time to even figure that out), the man lifted his hands up and removed his helmet.

Now, Sakajin knew very well what clones were. Copies of the original, supposedly in every way, shape, and form. Though she hardly believed that someone could make an entire army's worth of them, it was intimidating enough to know who they were based on; Jango Fett. His name was synonymous with skill, known even to some no-good orphan making a life for herself on Coruscant. She expected to see a face that looked similar to the several she'd already seen on the videos accessible on the network of the Black Halo. Videos that might have been illegally obtained at some point, both on the battlefield and the clone's homeworld, Kamino.

Sakajin didn't expect the face she saw. He was a clone, definitely so, but it wasn't hard at all to miss the giant, misshapen scar that covered half his face. There was a patch of hair that extended just above the hairline and behind the ear that had never grown correctly, leaving his haircut slightly lopsided, though it was obvious he kept it very well otherwise.

She tried not to stare.

The key word was 'try'.

The clone noticed right away what her attention was drawn to when he removed his helmet, either through the attentiveness of her eyes, or simply the way her mouth gaped open ever so slightly. Unperturbed and almost surprisingly casual, he held the helmet in one hand while the other reached up and gestured over the burned, scarred side of his face.

"Happened in my first real combat mission," The clone said, shrugging as he dropped the helmet on the small table beside the bed. He didn't sit beside her, but his stance was...relaxed. Casual, even. "Someone thought it was a great idea t'give a Geonosian a flamethrower. Can still see outta that eye, surprisingly enough."

Sakajin didn't respond. Even she didn't know if it was through an unwillingness to cooperate with someone she'd been trained to see as an enemy, or simply because she didn't know how to respond to someone who was being so...kind? She half-expected someone to come rolling in, verbal guns blazing, trying to force out some sort of confession or answer so they had enough reason to shoot her in the head and be done with it.

The silence didn't deter the clone, who merely let out a sigh, crossed his arms, and gave her a somewhat stern look.

"What's your name?" He asked. "We couldn't find anything to identify ya' when you straight up passed out on us. Gave us all a bit of a scare, finding this lil' thing in the back of the complex huddled up in a closet."

Was that an insult? Sakajin wasn't sure if she should have taken it as one or not, and merely pursed her lips. Should she answer? Act dumb? Obviously they didn't figure out that she wasn't some captured civilian. They had no record or knowledge she had been related to General Grievous in any way, considering she had never seen actual combat before that mission.

Playing dumb seemed to be Sakajin's speciality anyway.

"Sakajin," She murmured, figuring it wasn't hurtful to give her first name.

The clone perked up, almost seeming surprised to hear her answer. He repeated her name, and it was obvious he wanted more than that, but the woman didn't give him an inch.

"Sakajin," She repeated, huffing before pulling her legs up to her chest in a moment of genuine annoyance. "...Do you have one?"

"Excuse me?" The clone asked, looking at her with a confused expression. His brows furrowed.

Sakajin clarified her question. "You're a...well, a clone right?" She wasn't sure if pointing out the obvious was insulting, and the tone of her voice seemed to communicate that plenty. "I mean, do you all have names? Do they name you when you're….created? Or do you just have numbers?" That was how it worked with droids, at least; none of them got names. Just one number after another in an ever-increasing cycle.

The clone didn't look all that offended, luckily enough. In fact, Sakajin felt surprised to hear him chuckling at her words. The expression of confusion or sternness broke into amusement, a smile across his lips. It was...kinda surreal, honestly.

She was making small talk with whom she had saw only as an enemy. It was one of the many intricacies of war and combat she never really thought about.

Sakajin nearly jumped when she felt the bed dip beside her. The clone, for lack of any other identifier at the moment, watched her with even more amusement. It was as if he was waiting for her to start puffing up like some scared little woodland creature. But she didn't (thank god for her short fur), and merely stared at him in kind.

"...My number is AE-2343. Not all that flashy, honestly." He took in a breath and let it out, as if he was contemplating something. "-But I'm also called Scorch."

"I wonder how you got that name," Sakajin said, feeling laughter start to bubble up from her chest. "Must have taken a lot of thinking."

"That's how a lot of clones get their names," Scorch said gently, leaning forward, but still glancing over to Sakajin every couple moments. "Mistakes, jokes, talents…."

Then everything fell silent. Sakajin didn't like this silence. It was too cold, too heavy, too….contemplating. But she waited for the question, one that she knew would inevitably come. It was also a question she still didn't have an actual answer to. Was she a hostage? A….smuggled scientist? God, she needed to be more creative than that.

The bed shifted as Scorch stood up, grabbing his helmet and putting it back on once more. That was odd enough, but what he said next floored her expectations completely.

"You're probably hungry. I'll have someone send food in for ya. You don't have any allergies with human rations? We weren't uh, sure what species you were and-"

"It'll be fine," Sakajin interrupted. She quickly explained (almost habitually), "I'm half-human, I can eat most of what you probably have."

Scorch sputtered for a moment before regaining himself. Somehow, Sakajin felt a bit more at ease with the situation, if only due to the man's inability to speak properly for a moment while he collected his thoughts.

"Well that's good then. I'll have something brought in soon. I'll return sometime later, Sakajin-" God, it was weird to hear her name from someone who wasn't yelling or growling at her. "-Also here, let me get this off you. We...weren't sure if you were a danger to yourself or not when we found you."

A mere minute later, Sakajin's wrist was free. She rubbed it absently as she watched the clone, Scorch, exit the room. It left her with a really, really strange emotion somewhere in her mind. Something between surprise and relief, but there was also something more, something she couldn't quite describe.

But at least she could communicate it with a somewhat hypothetical question: when was the last time she had spoken to someone who wasn't Grievous or Count Dooku?

* * *

She had been given some rations to eat, some water to drink, and was otherwise equally content and surprised with the level of care she was given. Sakajin felt as though they weren't treating her so much as a prisoner, especially if they didn't know who she was or who she was affiliated with. It made sense that they were opting to treat her well. But regardless of her level of treatment or care, it didn't change the fact that there was absolutely nothing to do to stave off the boredom.

People often thought of confinement as being just another obstacle for a hero to pass, to meditate or to hone physical skills. For more crafty heroes, one might even assume that they'd scour inch by inch to find even the smallest possibility to escape.

But for Sakajin, that romanization of confinement was hardly true. She knew how to meditate, knew she should have been keeping up with her physical strength, and knew very well that she should take the first chance at breaking out. But did she do any of that?

In a short answer: no, she didn't. Instead, Sakajin was far too engrossed in her own thoughts to bother with much of anything else. Some might call it meditation, but that was far more peaceful and self-accepting than what Sakajin often endured. Meditation meant emptying one's mind, clearing it of all stress and worry. When the woman herself dwelled, it was quite the opposite; stress and worry were the very forefront of her thoughts.

She sat on the bed, knees up to her chest and empty food tray sitting on the small table a few paces away. It had been barely over a full day that she'd been captured, going by logical deduction of how long she had been out after the clones initially got her. A day she'd been absent from the closest thing she'd known as a home.

She should have felt almost grateful to have some separation from the general. Any chance at peace and quiet was often welcome, and most days where she didn't come face-to-face with his anger or aggravation was something of a treat. But she _never_ wanted something like this; being trapped on a base now held by Republic forces. There were simply so many ways that it could go south. She wasn't just an innocent bystander anymore, a non-combat worker who could get the benefit of the doubt when it came to war crimes.

"Congratulations, Sakajin," She whispered to herself, letting out a growl of pent-up annoyance before shifting onto her feet so she could stand and stretch. "First mission and you manage to get yourself captured. What a _fine_ apprentice you turned out to be."

Her stature certainly didn't help at all, metaphorically speaking. She wasn't simply just another battle droid, but considering her closeness to both the computer systems of a main Separatist ship as well as General Grievous, she wouldn't be surprised if-

The door opened up on the other side of the room, quickly catching Sakajin's attentions as she merely continued to stretch her arms up above her head. She quickly recognized the clone as being the first one she met, the one named Scorch.

"I'm surprised you haven't gone mad with boredom," He said, sounding almost casual. The door shut behind him as he stepped inside the room. "Not a lot of people can do without something to keep their minds distracted."

"Guess I'm just really good then," Sakajin murmured, yawning once before sitting back onto the bed once more. "Got plenty of thoughts to keep me occupied for a long time."

That seemed enough to catch the clone's attention. As he slipped off his helmet, Sakajin couldn't help but notice the slight twitch of his lips into an almost charming smile.

"Thoughts?" He said curiously. "What sort of thoughts you got goin' in that head of yours?"

Even Sakajin wasn't too dense to figure there was more in his question than simply asking what she was thinking about; or perhaps she was simply being too careful. Either way, the woman shrugged her shoulders.

"Lots of them. Worry, stress, all the stuff you just….gotta love." She sighed, not even sure where to begin on what was information she could say versus information she couldn't. Training for being captured and questioned, no matter how kindly, wasn't ever really part of what she learned.

Regardless, the explanation seemed to sate whatever curiosity that Scorch had. He sat on the bed beside her, slowly enough that Sakajin figured it was for her benefit. But before he could further the conversation with more questions of his own, she figured that it was fair to ask one herself.

"So who are you?" She asked. Sakajin turned her head to look at him more clearly, taking in all the foreign details that lay in his armor alone. If they had significance, she certainly didn't know any of them. Scorch looked about ready to give her some obvious, smart-assed reply, so she quickly added some clarification. "I mean, besides your name. For all I know, you could be running this operation. I figure some is secret, but….I'm just curious. You never really told me any of that. Isn't that sort of mandatory in these capturing scenarios?"

Whether he was surprised that she asked that or noticed at all, Scorch didn't at all indicate; he merely looked a little curious. But at least he didn't ignore the question, keeping the overall tone of the conversation casual.

Scorch let out a chuckle as he answered. "I only wish I could say I'm in charge here," he started, shifting a little so that he looked a bit more comfortable on the bed. "I'm just a sergeant."

"Sergeant?" Sakajin asked, her confusion genuine. She only understood the vague ranking system of the droid army, which she never even had close experience with. She had only looked over the new ones just built, coming in for a check to ensure they were built correctly.

"It just means I'm a leader of a squad," Scorch quickly explained. "The lowest leadership role a clone can have. I'm in line to rank up though, depending on how well my record looks and-" He stopped after a moment, looking almost sheepish that he had started to rant on about something that, to him at least, probably hardly mattered.

"No," Sakajin insisted, offering him a smile. "Go on? What's the next rank that you can get?"

For a moment the clone merely stared at her incredulously.

"...You're aware that was not the intention of me coming in here at all, right?"

"Absolutely. I figured you were going to ask me exactly who I was, where I'm from, and if I pose a threat to you or not," Sakajin said bluntly, deciding that a charade of stupidity or innocence wasn't exactly going to work in her favor. "If you wanted to know any of that, you don't have to be so….subtle about it."

"Really?" Scorch asked. "That's….not what I was taught for interrogating prisoners." It was amazing how much a simple look of awe and confusion could make someone look so inexperienced.

And in that one moment, Sakajin couldn't help but feel….relieved? It was a hard emotion to catch, but it did plenty to comfort the layers of nervousness and worry that had otherwise been plaguing her mind. Here was a clone who was in a similar position to herself. New, relatively inexperienced, unsure how to go about things other than how he's been taught. She almost felt bad that they were on opposite sides, since despite the casual conversation they were still (whether he knew it or not) enemies.

"And I wasn't taught on how to be a good prisoner either," Sakajin pointed out with a shrug. "Seems we are in the same boat."

Scorch was silent for a few, long seconds. At first, Sakajin merely thought that he was merely taking in the information, but eventually she got a little worried that perhaps she had said something she shouldn't have. Did she let on too much? Was he starting to doubt something about her? Sakajin felt the worry start bubbling up in her stomach.

"Something wrong?" She asked carefully with a careful, measured tone.

After a moment, Scorch glanced up to her with a firm expression, enough that it did plenty to jostle her worry even more. She started to feel on edge.

"Actually…." The clone started. Sakajin was ready to jump away, her muscles and mind tense and alert, despite having no weapon; it was merely instinct at that point. But Scorch's next several words did plenty to drain all of that nervousness away. "...I was uh, trying to think of a pun off that, but I got nothing."

It took a moment for it to settle. And when it did, Sakajin couldn't help but laugh; she laughed harder for something so stupid than she had in a long time, longer than she could remember. Everything she had expected and anticipated from being captured, at least at that point, had been entirely turned on its head.

She tried not to make too obvious when she smiled and made a gesture with her hand. "Oh well," She said, "I mean, I guess it's all _water_ under the bridge now."

"That was horrible," Scorch said, but he didn't seem to hide the amusement and laughter that seemed to simmer just beneath his words.

"At least I had something."

The laughter from both died down a few moments later, leaving them in a silence once more. Sakajin wasn't sure where the conversation would go from there, and she was hesitant to think about it. There was no getting out of the inevitable, the moment that the clone decided to ask for it himself.

Before Sakajin could try opening her mouth, maybe in hopes to steer the conversation in her own way, the clone had beat her to it. But his question, despite the fact that she'd told him otherwise, was not what she had expected.

"What species are you?" He asked, obviously trying to be delicate despite the heavy possibility of sounding outright offensive. Some took the question quite sensitively, but Sakajin? She...was rather neutral.

"A hybrid," She murmured. It had been a long time since anyone had even asked her that. "Human and Tarael."

"I've...never heard of that species before," Scorch admitted, and he sounded rather embarrassed. "I've had to learn about a lot of cultures, but that….is a new one. Small population?"

"Isolated, actually," the woman corrected gently, taking a little bit away from the man's obvious nervousness. "I think they only recently joined with the Republic…..sometime ago. I'm not sure."

"Not sure?" The question sounded surprised.

"Well, I haven't seen any of the Tarael homeworld since I was a child." That much information seemed plenty safe to give, in all honesty. Few people even seemed to know who the Tarael are. "I lived on Coruscant for more of my life."

Scorch hummed in some vague interest. "Your mother was a human?"

"My father was. I don't know much about how my parents met. Just happen to be in the right place at the right time, I suppose." That was a little more of a lie, but only vaguely. "From what I heard, they loved one another very much despite the species difference."

Sakajin almost felt as though the clone was about to dig deeper still into her past, perhaps in hopes to learn more of her identity. But he surprised her yet again with a shift in topic.

"...You know, some people say they feel sorry for us," The man glanced over to Sakajin. She caught his gaze carefully, and noticed a sense of softness in his eyes. It wasn't the look of a man who was interrogating her. "We don't have parents. Every clone grows up with brothers, and that's all the family we've ever really known."

Sakajin suspected at least that he was trying to connect with her; and it honestly worked. She did feel some sense of similarity with the clone sitting beside her, despite all the differences in their lives and the sides they technically fought for. She hadn't felt so comfortable talking to someone else in a long time; it was hilarious and sad all at the same time.

But it was nice.

* * *

They spoke for some time more, though for however long, Sakajin lost track of time. They flipped from topic to topic, never delving all that deep so that Sakajin felt uncomfortable or that she gave anything away to suggest she wasn't some innocent hostage taken on the base. Instead they spoke of past experiences, thoughts, even a little bit of their own childhoods (which turned out, obviously, to be entirely different from one another). But for the first time in a long time, Sakajin felt genuinely at-ease in talking to someone else.

Scorch didn't threaten her, didn't push her, didn't do anything to make the woman feel like she was anything but another person having a simple conversation. She knew her guard was down, well below what it should have been, and he could have taken advantage of it at any time. But...he didn't.

At first, Sakajin simply thought it was a coincidence. But after several aversions of deeper inquiry, she began to realize that it was on purpose. He was avoiding it.

There was a beep from the clone's comlink. He glanced at it after a moment, then shifted his eyes to Sakajin.

"It seems we'll have to continue the conversation later," He murmured, getting off the bed and pulling his helmet back on over his face, hiding his eyes behind the black, expressionless visor. "I'll have someone send dinner in soon."

Sakajin stared at him for a short while, as if trying to figure out what kind of game he was playing at. It just didn't make sense; he had every opportunity to start pulling out information from her, but he didn't take a single one. It was outright confusing.

"You never asked me if-"

"I figure that's a topic of conversation for another time," Scorch interrupted her, almost as if he knew she was going to ask it. He looked a bit pressed for words for a moment, trying to figure out what to say. "...I figure it would be easier for you to make a decision of what you want to do first before telling me." A pause. "Er. I mean if you wanted to lie or tell the truth."

"Wait, you mean-"

"We assumed you weren't neutral the moment we captured you," Scorch explained. "...We found records with your DNA signature on the base. Your name is on a couple of documents we've found and...you have their emblem on your clothes." Oh, shit.

It made Sakajin's heart sink, despite knowing very well that it was bound to happen at some point. She just wanted to feel some satisfaction that the information had been kept at bay for as long as she could hold off. At least it wasn't entirely her fault. But her clothes? Now that was pretty embarrassing. She completely forgot about them, something so obvious and simple as simply having the emblem of General Grievous neatly sewn into the back of her short cloak.

At least it got one thing out of the way. One less hard question that he needed to ask her.

"So you've been playing me?" Sakajin asked, suddenly feeling defensive of herself and unsure of the extent in which they knew of her. "Why...did you…." She sighed, trying (and failing) to get a feel of his intentions. "You could have kept that restraint on my wrist, you know."

"We wanted to see if you'd be a danger to others under the pretense that you could, well, escape. We know you've worked for the Seppies, but….I have the feeling you're not combat. Or at least, you've never seen combat yet."

Despite herself, Sakajin glanced down to her lap. That seemed to be enough of an answer

"...You seem like a good person, Sakajin," Scorch continued. It hurt to hear her name like that; it almost reminded her of how a parent might say it. "You seem to know that too. I don't figure you joined them by choice, right?"

Sakajin continued to stare down at her lap. She felt…embarrassed? Afraid? It was completely indescribable, but he was hitting home like a knife to the heart with every word he spoke.

"...You could almost say that," She whispered. She had joined the Separatists very much by choice, but under circumstances that made it the only option she could logically choose. "Don't label me as entire innocent though. I'm still on other side, regardless of why I joined it."

For Sakajin, she had never needed to consider the lives involved. If only she could have remained that way; blissfully neutral, the ability to point a finger and say 'hey, it isn't my fault, I was only following orders! I wasn't directly hurting anyone!'.

Scorch paused, letting her words sink before speaking himself. "We hoped that you'd be willing to help us," He said carefully. "It isn't too late to do what's right."

"And how might I do that?" Only then did the woman lifted her head to look at him, expression calm, but careful. She didn't particularly like the way the conversation was starting to go. It made her head hurt too much, too many thoughts and worries bubbling back to the forefront of her mind that played between making an easy choice, or being loyal and ignorant.

Scorch ignored a faster, higher-pitched beeping that was coming from his wrist comlink.

"Joining us instead?" He offered, as if it was something as simple as deciding what to eat.

"What if it isn't that easy?" Sakajin rebutted.

She couldn't just up and switch sides. Everything, every part of her life since childhood had been built upon being part of the Separatists, whether she was consciously aware of it or not. It went deeper than simply joining them for convenience.

It was too much to think about. Too much to worry about, too much to-

"Hey," Scorch's sharp, firm tone interrupted Sakajin's thoughts before they had enough time to start festering. "I never said you had to make the decision now. Just…" He sighed, tapping at his wrist comlink so that the beeping stopped. "...Just take time to think about it."

He stepped out of the room without much more of a word, leaving Sakajin to herself and her thoughts. She didn't even know where to begin thinking about herself and her situation.

Join the Republic?

The choice sounded promising in itself; it could allow her a sense of freedom from what she had been all but too used to beneath both Dooku and Grievous.

But just as she had told Scorch, the choice wasn't as simple as one might assume.

She'd be leaving the servitude of one side to merely join it in another, whether anyone else understood it or not.


	6. And Consequences

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was by far my most favorite chapter to write (so far) for this fic. I think that this chapter has gotten the most in depth in terms of character development for Sakajin, and really starts to hammer on a lot of key themes to the character that I was really excited to start showing and developing; her guilt, her thoughts of war, her thoughts of where she was in the war, etc. It was really nice to start throwing in a second character for her to actually interact with as well in the form of Scorch, and I hoped that their interactions are as interesting to read as they were to write.
> 
> I know I ask this plenty on my other chapters, but especially for this one: please review! I would absolutely love to know what you guys think of this chapter and what I did with it.

_The sky was vast, glittering, and bright. The horizon was barely tinted a soft orange glow, though it dissipated into the cool greens and blues as it fell over the city of Karinu. Sakajin stood, staring out the glass of her home's eastern wing, watching the stars twinkle faintly behind the haze of the half-set sun. She'd been standing there for quite some time, long enough that it drew the attention of another._

" _Sakajin?" She heard a familiar voice say. The young girl, who had only turned 7, turned around to see the owner. Her expression fell slightly when she realized who it was, because she knew it meant that her alibi of studying in her room didn't work at all. "You're up here rather late, aren't you?"_

" _I got tired of reading," She said lightly, as innocent as a child could; but the excuse would hardly work on her father._

_Dartri looked down at her for a few moments before sighing. He looked tired, owning the face of a man who had seen far too much stress in far too few years._

" _You know you don't have to lie to me, honey," The man said gently, kneeling down beside his daughter. "If you wanted to be in the observatory, you only had to ask."_

_She didn't reply directly to his comment, half-sure that he meant it honestly. But she was too bothered otherwise. This didn't go unnoticed by her father, who peered at her carefully, sensing the fall in her emotions despite being, against what others might think, merely a human. He had gotten far too used to what others thought of him after his wife left._

" _...What are you thinking right now, Saka?" He finally asked, slowly moving so he could sit down at one of the chairs in the observatory. It was a room made solely for looking at the sky, and it was something that the Tarael enjoyed doing, being a species that enjoyed astronomy._

_Dartri never much shared the sentiment, but it seemed to have passed onto his daughter. He pat a hand on the chair beside him, urging Sakajin to sit. She obliged him carefully, looking still ever so deep in thought despite being still such a young child by any species' standards._

_Sakajin glanced at her father for a moment before she spoke. It was still rather amazing, her ability for vocal speech. Dartri had always assumed she would be more like her mother, whom was a species who communicated through near-complete telepathy. Sakajin, it seemed at least, never got that ability herself (and in some ways, that was a miracle)._

_It was just one less thing that Dartri had to worry about on a plateful of anxiety._

" _Some people talk about mommy," The young girl said lightly. The mere reference to his late wife was enough to perk his attention._

" _...What...do they say about her?" He asked, calm and careful. He wasn't alien to hearing rumors about her since she left; many of them weren't very kind to her image, nor to his own. He prepared for something vicious, something a father would never want his daughter to hear, but the question only brought forth….curiosity._

" _They said that she was a Jedi," Sakajin said, sounding and looking far too calm for a child saying those sorts of things about her mother. "...They said she left to go back. Never said where."_

_The man's breath caught in his throat. Sakajin didn't seem to notice._

" _Was mommy a Jedi?" She asked, ever so innocent for a child._

" _Oh," Dartri looked as though someone had stabbed him in the heart, his eyes wide, his blood running cold-but he recovered quickly enough. "Oh heavens no. I mean, if she were a Jedi, how could we have had you? Jedi don't fall in love." It was a hasty response, one without thought or logic. But to a child, reassurance from a parent was more than enough to calm her worries._

" _Oh," She said, letting the accusation drop as easily as a leave from a tree on a windy evening. "...That's all they were saying. I kinda hoped it was true."_

_Dartri gently reached a hand over to start combing his fingers through his daughters hair, but he let out a bit of a huff. Not so much for his daughter, but from himself. A scoff of understanding from what he had seen himself._

_But he didn't push off Sakajin's thoughts._

" _Why did you hope that?" He asked carefully. Sakajin was silent for a few moments, merely twiddling her fingers as she tried to think of how to word it without sounding like a baby. Everyone called her a baby when she talked about it like that._

" _Because it meant that mommy is a fighter, and she's off doing good things for the galaxy. That's why she would have left us right?" She turned to her father, and he could see it; her eyes were bright...but watery. Thin streaks of tears fell from her lower set of eyes, the most human part of her that someone could spot at a glance. "Because she's a Jedi, she had to go back to….being a hero."_

_Dartri felt his heart break a little. He cursed a million things and more that he had to see something like that in his daughter's eyes._

" _No, honey," he whispered, wiping away the tears with the pad of his thumb. "She is a hero, but she's not a Jedi. They aren't heroes." His voice sounded pained and tense, but all Sakajin focused on was his words alone._

" _They're...not?" She asked, looking confused and unsure of how to take his answer. Dartri tried to force a smile, tried to make something so big and philosophical so much easier for a child to understand._

" _The Jedi have a lot of rules, honey. And they make people do things they don't want to do. They….do a lot of things they shouldn't do. They're not the good guys, okay?"_

_Sakajin nodded her head slowly. "Okay, daddy."_

_It was a painful, tense silence. Dartri wondered if she hardly understood half of what she was peering into. He just didn't want her to make the same mistake._

" _Promise daddy one thing though, okay?"_

_Sakajin looked up at him, her eyes a little less tear-filled eyes. Dartri took in a breath and forced another smile._

" _Promise daddy that you'll always keep yourself safe, and never, ever trust the Jedi. I know mommy would ask the same thing."_

_Confusion was a strong emotion for a child, but the trust of a parent, who seemed to know the secrets of the entire universe, was stronger still._

" _I promise," the child whispered, the words taken to heart. She stared at him for a few moments before looking away. "...I wish I knew more about mommy."_

" _I know you do, honey," Dartri murmured, still combing his fingers through her hair._

" _I promise to tell you more about her when you're older."_

* * *

They had been at the base for a week. Seven long days that could have been far, far worse if it wasn't for the constant interruptions of a particular clone who seemed plenty interested in more than just hard, difficult questions.

Sakajin was grateful for it, and that might have been the point. It was a week that Scorch hadn't brought up the question again to her, instead coming across as more and more casual. He was bright, lively, and entirely different from what she might have ever considered a soldier of the Republic army. She figured that, when the rumors said they were bred for battle, that was all they ever had on their minds. That certainly wasn't the case.

The sergeant made horrible jokes. He encouraged her to talk about stupid, little details that wouldn't matter to anyone at all (So you can reroute a thermal conductor with only a wire and minitool?). For a man who looked as battle-hardened as what her original stereotype had been (scarred, hard-eyed and tough), Scorch turned out to be an almost surprisingly gentle man.

It was the closest experience the woman had to talking to a friend since she was living in the orphanage on Coruscant.

At first, she assumed that the lack of pressure was due to him trying to persuade her, influence her perspective through kindness and warmth. Certainly that made enough sense, and for the first day after the initial….conflict, she near-refused to speak to him any.

Scorch assured her he wasn't even the man to make the final say, regardless of what her personal desire might have been.

They were sitting on the bed again, Sakajin mostly trying to ignore him, and Scorch, for lack of being able to say anything else that might assure her, explained, "It's up to our commander. I just gave you the option since I knew you had a good chance of getting it from him."

The logic, or the seeming lack of it, didn't make sense to her. Sakajin had turned to Scorch with a look of mildly annoyed confusion.

"Then why in the world would you ask me at all?"

The clone shrugged, looking almost sheepish, before replying, "I didn't want you to feel like a prisoner. Our commander isn't….gentle. He's, well. He would have sooner considered you a Seppie sympathizer and tossed you for a court date on Coruscant. But I…."

Sakajin stared at him, waiting for an answer.

It was obvious he had a hard time trying to find the right words. "You're….not the face of a Seppie sympathizer, honestly."

"Oh?" She said, perked to know what he meant by that. It could mean a whole lot of things, honestly.

"I mean you're not a...droid? You're not some cold-hearted ambassador or this greedy profiteer from the war. You're just a…."

"A girl?" Sakajin offered, only half-teasing.

"No, not not that, you're very…."

"...gentle?"

"Yes! Very gentle-like, you're delicate, you're-"

"Oh, oh no," Sakajin interrupted, her expression that of shock, taken back by that one-word description that he applied to her. She almost felt offended by that, but not in what one might assume;it had nothing to do with sticking up for her gender. "I'm gentle, I'll say I'm gentle, but I'm not delicate."

Delicate wasn't what got through General Grievous' many hours of sparring. Delicate wasn't what endured 24 standard months of loneliness when her father died.

Sakajin wasn't delicate.

Scorch quickly caught on that he had hit something sensitive, so he merely held his hands up in defense, apologizing quickly enough so that the woman's face fell back to a neutral look.

The silence sat between them for just a few seconds before Scorch tried to explain himself a little better.

"Droids are what I normally deal with," he said. "They're….well, they're not a person. You program them one way and they'll do what they're programmed to do. Tell them to fight a war and...that's what they do."

Sakajin winced a little bit from that. True, she hadn't been a manufacturer of the droids themselves, but she couldn't help but feel a little more connected to his attempted analogy than the clone probably meant for.

She merely hummed and nodded her head; she still understood the concept.

Scorch sighed. "...A person is different. I...haven't had to deal with many people, personally. You're the first and well-"

He looked at her, and Sakajin met his gaze.

"You're not...evil? It's hard to sympathize with someone who's evil."

"That's true," the woman agreed.

More silence. It was hard to figure out what to fill it with, especially when the only lingering topic of conversation wasn't all that comfortable to talk about (Sakajin's particular alignment). But Scorch seemed ready for that.

He pushed himself off the edge of the bed, back onto his feet. Instead of putting his helmet back onto his head and stepping back out of the room as he had finished their last few conversations, Scorch clipped his helmet to his waist and held out a hand for Sakajin to take.

"How about we take a walk?" He suggested gently. There didn't feel to be anything ulterior about the offer, at least from what Sakajin herself could tell (and she wasn't all that good when it came to ulterior motive). Nevertheless, she glanced her green eyes to his hand for a moment, considered it, then cautiously held out and took his hand.

The clone helped her out of the bed and onto her feet. But before he let go, she felt something else wrap around her wrist. With a click and within a few mere moments, she had a metal cuff locked on her arm. Sakajin's eyes flew to it instinctively in surprise, her blood chilling for a split-second in fear that she had done something wrong. But the clone let go of her arm as soon as it was on.

"It's just for safety purposes," Scorch explained, giving the smaller woman time to look it over and mentally process it. Despite her initial surprise, it made enough sense that he would do that if they were actually going to leave the room (and god, was she happy for a chance to stretch her legs).

"Honestly," Sakajin said, side-eyeing the clone. "I'd be surprised if you didn't put some sort of tracker on me." It wasn't anything overly complicated, from what she could tell from an initial look-over. Plain, thin, it had an internal lock that might have been magnetic, or maybe connected to a switch. Nevertheless, it wasn't something she felt all that compelled to bother with. She had no tools to pick it, and no desire to get it off since she wasn't in any sort of danger.

The two of them stepped out of the room and into the hallway. Initially, they came across one other clone who looked as though he was patrolling through. When he glanced at Sakajin and then looked to Scorch in confusion, the sergeant merely waved it off.

"Just letting her have some fresh air, don't worry," He assured his subordinate, who nodded and continued on making his way down the hall and out of view.

Sakajin felt odd seeing the base again, only as a prisoner of sorts instead of a visitor with her once-master. It looked relatively untouched, honestly, as though the clones had merely hopped inside the base and called it their own. But it felt odd that the halls looked so empty. She would have figured to see dozens of clones, having always assumed they were so numerous everywhere else in the war.

Her confusion must have been obvious enough.

"Expecting something more?" Scorch asked gently as they stepped down one of the outer hallways; one of the same that Sakajin herself had been pacing through mere days before when she was trying to figure out how to get outside.

"Yes," She said. "Literally, actually. I figured if you all were going to storm the base, there'd be more of you in here."

"You think the Republic has that many people, even clones, to spend to capture a small moon base?" The countering question made Sakajin think just a few levels more, and answered her question quite well in some respect. Once he gave it some time to process, Scorch said, "Two part system. First is the alpha teams. Send 'em in, clean it out, secure it-"

"So like, what you've already done now?" Sakajin inquired, carefully glancing at the clone as he lead, and they both turned down a corner in the hall.

She had long since lost direction of where they were.

"Yup," Scorch agreed, smiling almost charmingly at her seeming to catch on. "Beta teams come in, finish anything, and see if we can take full control over the facility."

He stopped rather suddenly, and it took Sakajin an extra moment to realize to stop walking herself. He stood at a small lift, punching in some buttons. She didn't understand what he was doing or where the lift went.

"Can I assume you don't normally find random little stowaways in the bases you try taking over?" She teased, watching as the lift doors opened. The two of them stepped inside, the doors shut, and it was immediately humming up a couple floors.

Scorch chuckled sheepishly. "No," He said through the laughter. "No, we don't. You're the first we've ever encountered. Which is-" He finally caught himself, sounding semi-serious once again as the two of them stepped out of the lift when it reached what seemed to be the top floor. "-Which is why...well, I have to wait for my commander for any kind of confirmation of what we're allowed to do for you."

"But you're allowed to let me roam around the base when you already know I was working for the Separatists?" Sakajin felt almost like a parent, maybe even an older, rather annoying sibling who simply wasn't feeling a sense of logic in something he was saying.

"Hey, I have jurisdiction enough for that," Scorch defended, his brows lifting for a moment. "I have enough power to decide if you're too much of a danger to take for a walk. Besides, knowing you can be trusted so far will make things look better when I bring them to my commander."

They hall they stepped into looked much like the one from before, though she distinctly noticed at the very end, there were large, almost arch-like windows. There was quite a bit of bright sunlight shining in from them.

"So," The woman whispered, feeling a bit curious as much as she did cautious. "If I were to...say, change sides...what would happen to me?"

Scorch hummed as he thought, his expression neutral. "Well, they'd probably take you back to Coruscant. Have you on watch for however long they deem necessary to make sure you don't try to contact anyone affiliated with them. I'd doubt you'd be tried for war crimes at this point, depending on your involvement with them. ….Servant?"

Sakajin's silence was enough to make Scorch stop walking, somewhere near the end of the hall, right before it spilled into the next room.

She stopped as well, staring at the ground for a few moment to contemplate her own thoughts; the temptation to lie all the way up to her final moments in front of whomever that commander was felt like a great one, but not something that was wise. Whether she chose to switch allegiance or not, she figured that it would only hurt her in the end.

"You could say….something like a servant," She whispered, not bothering to wait for Scorch to start walking again. The adjacent room was bigger than any she had seen on the base before. It looked very much like the command room, and was more than likely just as big. The only difference from the two was that instead of huge, glossy computer screens filling up the walls of the room, there were windows.

The windows themselves were huge and clear, nearly invisible if it wasn't for the ever so slight sheen that came from the angle of the sunlight somewhere high above. The forest outside seemed just as massive as it had when Sakajin stood at the forest floor, but with the given height of a few extra floors, she could see more of the sky through the blanket of leaves on the treetops.

She stepped across the room so she could stand near a window, feeling equal parts awed and humbled by the size of the forest for the second time in the last few days.

The steps of the clone Scorch were faint, and hardly important enough for her to pay attention to when there was something much more amazing just in front of her eyes. He took a place beside her.

The two of them looked on in silence, merely taking in the vastness of the forest itself which seemed to go on forever. Sakajin could still remember the smell of the trees, the taste of the air, the sound of the mysterious wildlife rushing about the underbrush.

"...On my mother's homeworld, Ev'ren, it is almost always twilight outside," Sakajin started to say in a slow, gentle tone. She didn't bother to look to see if Scorch was listening to her. "The sun only rises once every couple of years, and only then for a few hours. When it finally sets again, it causes the most beautiful spectacles of colors in the sky."

She let the words settle for the clone, let him take it in and try to imagine something that, to her at least, was one of the most beautiful things in the entire galaxy. She had seen it once as a toddler, and once as a child. Both had been completely spectacular to watch, like the stuff of dreams; one of the reasons she was happy to be partially Taralian, to have some level of their intricate, complex eyesight.

Scorch didn't interrupt or ask any questions, so the woman figured it was alright to continue rambling.

"The Tarael love astronomy. If a family has enough money, sometimes they'll have their own observatory built on the top level of their home, with this huge glass dome so you can look out and see the stars shining through the soft haze of the twilight sun." Sakajin remembered it all so clearly. It was one of the places she felt safest as a child. The darkness of the sky above her, the quiet of the observatory itself. "...I probably spend too much time in my family's observatory when I was little. Probably why I get nervous sometimes about long-distance space travel."

She couldn't help but laugh as another memory surfaced in her mind. Sakajin finally turned to look at Scorch-only to find him looking at her as well. "You should have seen me when I was a kid. Twelve years old and I hitched a ride on a cargo ship bound for Coruscant. Didn't know where I was going on that planet, and didn't really care."

"Why did you leave your home planet?" Scorch asked, sounding, if anything, perhaps a slight judgemental. "What did your parents think about you doing something like-"

"I didn't have parents anymore."

The air felt a little heavy all of a sudden. Sakajin didn't give Scorch any time to apologize before explaining what she meant.

"My father died from some chronic condition when I was a kid. Don't know what it was, nobody bothered to tell me anyway. My mother...left. A long, long time ago. I only remember a little of what she was like."

She returned her gaze to the forest just beyond the window. Was it still cold outside? It certainly didn't look very windy, and the sun was mighty bright. Sakajin could still remember the chill against her skin, the feeling of grass, leaves, earth beneath her feet.

"Still," Scorch murmured, finally finding a verbal foot to stand on when it felt appropriate to edge a little deeper into his curiosity. "Didn't you have more family than your parents?"

Ah, now that was a tricky subject. It wasn't one that Sakajin had to think about, much less talk about often at all. It was hard enough for her to accept even as an adult, let alone try to explain the complexities to someone else who hardly understood her mother's culture.

"I'm a hybrid," She stated, as if it wasn't already so plainly obvious. Her facial features, her mix of human parts on someone that certainly didn't look human at all. "I don't know if it's a culture-wide thing or not. After...after my mom, my dad had a hard time getting along with her family, and of course by extension, me. I... was never personally all that close with them even before she left, from what I was told."

"So you just….left?" Scorch asked, sounding almost surprised.

"Yup," Sakjin said with a nod, her tone solid and firm. "I left...the moment I realized he wasn't coming back. Cargo ship came in one of the trading centers. I bribed one of the workers with the only money I could find that my parents kept, and...then I was on Coruscant."

"That sounds….hard." Sakajin wouldn't have felt hurt if the clone didn't feel any sympathy for her, but for some reason, hearing that very basic, simple emotion in another person's voice was comforting. It was as if it was worth talking about her past, like someone was actually listening and _cared_ for once in her life. Orphans never cared about someone's sob story when they had their own.

And maker, she figured that Grievous might laugh at her if she tried to vent out the same thing to him as she was to Scorch.

For being a prisoner, she was feeling a lot more comfortable in expressing her feelings than she ever was in the Black Halo, or even on Coruscant.

* * *

And so the rest of the week ensued with much the same happenings. Scorch often took Sakajin out to walk around base, and every day they'd make more ground, and she would see more and more of what she had seen original Grievous.

She was never allowed by herself outside of the room (which she later learned was repurposed for housing her, as that had been one minor curiosity), but Scorch visited more than often enough that was never much of a concern.

Sakajin liked talking to him. More than once, she found herself talking to him like he was a friend she never actually had; he listened to her. It was more than anyone else had ever done, emotionally speaking. And maker, the man was a stranger to her; for all she knew, none of what she said might ever matter. He could simply not care at all about her past, her feelings, any of it at all, and yet Sakajin still felt genuinely good about being able to communicate things to someone else without fear of being demeaned or degraded.

The week felt like a weight off her shoulders. But, in much of the same way, it was a new mountain of stress to deal with. Scorch did keep his promise to her, he never asked again what she wanted to decide on, but that didn't mean that he got damn well close to the topic.

It didn't help at all when he started, inevitably, learning more about her. That was Sakajin's own fault. She got complacent, she got grounded on someone, trusted him too much when she knew he would use the information against her in some way. Through bits and pieces of information, he soon learned that she was a mechanic for the Separatists, and then inevitably that she was a fighter.

And honestly, he didn't believe her at first when he found out she was General Grievous' apprentice.

"I didn't even realize that the clanker king himself even wanted an apprentice," Scorch said, his brows furrowed in confusion. The two of them were in the windowed room again on the top floor of the compound, and the sun was nearing the horizon, though one really couldn't tell through the thick layers of the treetops. It was starting to darken outside.

"He didn't actually," Sakajin said, letting out a sigh as she fell into one of the chairs nearest the windows. "Neither of us didn't really have a choice in the matter."

They looked severely out of place, the chairs of course (though a clone and a Human/Tarael hybrid would also be true), as it seemed that the clone teams on the base had pulled them from various other rooms to have something to sit on. Nobody knew what the room's original purpose was for, but it was serving as a pretty damn good view.

"Did you like being his apprentice?" Scorch asked slowly; Sakajin noted the use of past tense, but said nothing on it. It was a waste to hang on to it, regardless of if she wanted to be free of his teachings or not. "I can't imagine a guy like that ain't all that easy."

"Honestly, I'm surprised I didn't die. Broken bones, suffocation, stabbing, blood loss, head trauma," Sakajin counted off each item as it came to the top of her head. "So many ways that I could have died and yet I didn't. And that was just in sparring. He doesn't pull any punches."

"He's a coward."

Sakajin was actually surprised to hear Scorch almost growl. She glanced to him for clarification, though she already knew some reasons he'd have to say that.

"Beatin' up someone like you," He explained. "I mean, no offense, but you're not exactly on the same level as him."

Well, he wasn't wrong, the woman had to give him that much.

But it wasn't long before the harder questions started to come up from that information. Scorch asked if she had killed anyone; she didn't. When Sakajin explained that she had only been sparring and training with only Grievous himself, the look of relief on the clone's face could have been humorous in any other situation.

"That'll really help you," He explained. "You're right in a situation where you shouldn't have any issue pleading your case. You were put there by circumstance, and you don't show any moral desire to hurt anyone. If….you offer some of your knowledge-"

"What are you talking about?" Sakajin asked suddenly, unsure if her reaction was out of defense or...fear. He was starting to tread on ground that she just didn't want to think about. But where Scorch might have backed down in days before, he certainly didn't now.

"You said you were a mechanic before you were Grievous' apprentice?" Scorch asked, as if trying to jog the woman's memory. "You have vital information about their droids that would give us an immeasurable help. I can't imagine how happy my commander would be if he heard you decided to join the fight on our side. And then your fighting skills-"

"Scorch, I don't-"

"-You said you were force sensitive right? I don't know the rules on how it works, but maybe you could even help the Jedi themselves and offer your skills and-"

" **STOP**!"

Scorch stopped dead mid-sentence. The air suddenly felt cold, like ice, but the echo of Sakajin's own voice seemed all too painful to her own fronds. For a moment, she felt as though she was burning up inside.

Jedi. The word made her feel angry, and she didn't even know why. It was worse than thinking about turning to the Republic; turning anywhere near the Jedi just felt...absolutely wrong. It made her almost feel sick to her stomach thinking about it.

She wasn't joining, helping, or getting anywhere near the Jedi.

It was a long, few minutes before either of them felt as though they could speak, Sakajin for lack of emotional ability, and Scorch because….well, Sakajin figured that he finally realized how hard he was stabbing with his forced questions and opinions on something that was already hard for her to think about.

It made her remember again, painfully, that he wasn't really a friend. He was still, technically, the enemy. The enemy she'd been pouring her heart to simply because she was never able to anyone else before.

The trip back to her room was silent. Scorch opened up the door for her, she stepped inside, and waited for the door to close. It didn't. She turned and looked at the clone, who stood in the doorway, dark eyes meeting hers with an expression that looked firm and serious; the expression she honestly expected of a battle-bred soldier.

"Nobody can force your loyalty, Sakajin," He said in a careful, measured tone. Her soft, emerald eyes fell to the floor, but his tone didn't shift. "Don't make a stupid mistake when you can help so many people with your skills instead."

The door closed barely a moment later, leaving Sakajin alone with her thoughts, and feeling more empty and isolated than she had in the last week of confinement.

She didn't sleep at all that night. Between her stress, the flicker of nightmares just as she was about to fall asleep, and a constant scraping sound of metal somewhere above her head, Sakajin wasn't about to get a moment of calm. It seemed only fitting, considering all that the had to start thinking about.

Nobody was coming to save her. It was something she had been trying to stave off every night, that constant, undying certainty that only made her feel hollow and terrified for her future. The life she was used to, the life she had found some emotional balance in, was entirely gone. Now it was up to the powers that be for whatever would happen to her next-and that was damn well terrifying. She actually felt even more helpless for her own life in the hold of the Republic than she ever did while she was with the Separatists.

Maker help her sanity before she even came face-to-face with Scorch's commander.

Also, what was that hellish sound? Sakajin had thought at first that it was just something with the system; maybe it was even someone messing with the innards of the base, the ventilation system or something in effort to further gut the base for anything of worth, or anything they didn't need in it.

But it just. Wouldn't. Stop. It had started quite a ways away at first, but it had...gotten progressively closer with time. Sakajin thought she might have been a little crazy when she finally realized it but…

She slipped out of bed. The lights of the room were off, and she didn't bother to turn them on, since she could see somewhat well without them anyway. The noise was unbearable. It wasn't that it was loud, it was just….grating. Literally. It was a grating, sharp, metallic noise that was painful, downright painful for her.

It made her head feel dizzy, the vibrations far too harsh for her sensitive equivalent of hearing. And it was coming from right above her room.

Sakajin looked up in confusion, trying to figure out why it was happening, and what the hell could be causing it. She doubted that it had anything to do with the clones who had overtaken the base.

_**THUNK!** _

Not even a second after that thought, her question was answered, and she was entirely correct. Before she could react, Sakajin saw and felt a section of the ceiling fall right in front of her and the bed, not more than a few feet, in fact.

It caught her completely off guard, so sudden and so completely absurd that she froze.

Sakajin didn't know what to do at first, merely staring at the piece, which was a sizable several feet wide by several feet long. Quite literally, a piece of the metal ceiling had just fallen down, as if it had been clean-cut. Not apparently smart enough to glance upwards first, she was about ready to kneel down and examine it when something else dropped from the ceiling.

It wasn't another piece of metal.

The woman would have screamed, catching enough of the shape to realize that it was huge, a good foot or two taller than her, and bipedal. Gold eyes almost glowed in the near-complete darkness of the room, staring down at her while a deep, guttural growl quickly accompanied the figure's appearance in her room.

But she didn't scream. Whether she instinctively knew who it was, or that she was simply too terrified to scream at all, Sakajin didn't know. What she did eventually figure out a few moments after rapidly backing away however, was that the figure wasn't at all a monster in her nightmares.

Well. Not from her actual nightmares, at least. The monster part could have still applied.

"Don't make a sound," came a growl, low and angry from the figure. The voice was harsh, masculine, and oh-so familiar. Despite herself and all she had described him to Scorch as, Sakajin was overjoyed to realize that the figure was indeed General Grievous.

She didn't care if Grievous returned because he was worried about her survival. She always figured that he hated her. But the joy and the happiness from not having to make that dreaded decision, now that was relieving.

At least, not having to make it in front of someone who genuinely cared about her answer. Someone who, for the first time, almost made her feel guilty that she never cared about what side she was on.

It didn't matter. Sakajin wasn't staying anyway, not that Grievous would give her the option.

She didn't get a chance to ask anything about how he got into the base in the first place, among plenty of other questions. Grievous merely glared at her, then made some vague gesture to follow him. Follow him?

When he jumped back up into the hole in the ceiling, that's when the woman understood what he meant. Ah. She didn't even bother pausing to wonder if this was a dream or not, because the mere suggestion of freedom was plenty to get her moving.

It took a bit longer for her, considering she was so much shorter, and she eventually resorted to using the table to climb up into the hole. Sakajin was eventually just behind her master, crawling a bit more noisily than she would have prefered through the metal shaft, mindlessly following wherever the cyborg led.

Somehow, Grievous managed to make almost no sound, despite being much heavier and made almost entirely of more durasteel than flesh. She still didn't ask any questions. She figured that was for later, when they were free of the base's confines and without risk of being heard. Did that mean there were clones patrolling about?

Did that mean that Grievous killed some?

For some reason, for some hypocritical reason, the thought made Sakajin's stomach turn. So she forced the curiosity down into the back of her head, a numbing of concern that she had done before when she first became a mechanic.

Just don't think about how you're contributing to a war. It doesn't matter, it doesn't affect you as long as you're safe, paid, and fed. People die, and people live. You're not part of it, you're just working.

It was a mindset that was quickly degrading beneath her feet, and Sakajin hardly had the time to think about it while she was trying to escape a Republic-taken base. She forced it down, and trudged on through what she assumed was a ventilation shaft.

A turn here, there, and eventually the woman completely lost track of where they were. But Grievous seemed to know exactly where he was going, so she felt confident in that alone.

Barely ten minutes later and she was out in the fresh air of the forest. And it was beautiful. If she wasn't under the gaze of her master, nor under the threat of being detected by enemy clones, she was sure that screaming in joy would have been at the top of her present list of things to do.

Grievous directed her harshly from one place to another, carefully leading them around the outside of the complex. For a while she didn't understand where he was taking her. Because if he was on the planet, it meant he had a ship. And of course, if the general had a ship, he needed a place to land that ship.

As far as she knew, the entire complex was being watched by the new clone tenants.

"Sir?" Sakajin whispered as they crept around towards the back, western end of the base. If she recalled correctly, that's where the landing platform was for most of the ships, but it seemed insane that he'd land anything there. "Where did you land the ship you came o-"

"Be quiet!" The general hissed, turning to glare at her sharply and shutting up any question she might have started thinking about asking. "Do you want me to leave you here and see what the clones do with you instead?" Obviously, Sakajin didn't answer.

They got to the landing platform soon enough, and to Sakajin's great surprise, there were still at least half a dozen Separatist ships still on the line, completely untouched.

But what was more was that she didn't see a ship among them that looked as if it had just landed. This was because of enough concern, because it meant that Grievous had completely relied on having ships still on the base, but since there were still plenty around, that seemed to be a worry for another time.

Her expression of relief was mostly on her face, since Sakajin didn't dare to make another noise, lest she be throttled by her master (she certainly didn't miss that).

Grievous picked the nearest ship. It was nothing fancy, but it looked small and fast. They started to approach it and begin to boarding sequences when Sakajin heard the unthinkable. The horrible. The absolute, downright, dreadful.

She heard a voice calling out to them to stop, to halt, to get away from the ship.

And if her memory served her well enough, she knew the voice was that clone sergeant, Scorch.

He wasn't alone either, there was an entire group of them, at least five that came running out onto the landing platform with guns pointed and commands harsh. It was almost as if they had tracked the duo for a while, waiting to ambush them trying to get a ship. It didn't make sense, considering how quiet they had been the entire time or the fact that they hadn't even been in the base for most of the sneaking.

But that's when Sakajin remembered the cuff on her wrist.

_Fuck._

It didn't matter to get it off right there after they'd been ambushed. Grievous let out an angry hiss as the blaster fires started coming there way; he deflected several while the boarding platform came down from the belly of the ship, Sakajin merely feeling like a fool as she jumped to avoid the blaster shots, which were mostly directed at her master anyway.

Sakajin wondered if that was on purpose.

Nevertheless, she retreated into the ship as soon as she could get inside, vaguely aware of a voice calling her name, a familiar voice that might have just been a figment of her imagination. She later told herself that's all it was, her imagination and guilt playing tricks on her.

Grievous bounded in shortly after she did, taking to the controls on the front of the ship faster than Sakajin could start pulling a breath into her lungs. Before she could even get a sense of what was going on, the ship was starting and already off the ground. It jostled with the hits from the blasters the clones held, but it wasn't nearly enough damage to stop it from taking off, hurdling through the air and out of the planet's atmosphere before the woman could even find herself in the co-pilot's seat.

It took her a while to realize what had happened, her mind letting the last half hour or less simmer in her thoughts. But Grievous didn't give her much time for that simmering. He put the ship on autopilot, the destination obviously that of the Black Halo, wherever it was (because it was certainly not orbiting the moon).

Grievous turned the chair to face her.

"Did you tell them anything?" He asked harshly, making Sakajin flinch from the ruthless, cold nature of the question.

"No," She answered softly. At least, she didn't tell them any information that would hurt the Separatists. Her personally, now that was an entirely different thing.

"Did they find out who you were?"

"...I…." Sakajin felt even worse, but through her fear of what he'd do if she told the entire truth, the woman decided to lie. "They found that I was a mechanic."

Thank the maker Grievous didn't seem more than mildly pissed at that information. Because he always seemed rather pissed.

"...You're lucky," He hissed. "If it wasn't for Dooku's interest in you, little girl, you would have been left on that planet for whatever fate the Republic had for you."

Sakajin didn't doubt that at all. She really did feel pretty lucky, along with feeling like shit, though that was mostly from the guilt. She didn't want to think about what Scorch thought of her now. She _shouldn't_ think about that, because he was the enemy, and who cared what your enemy thought of you?

For some reason, Sakajin felt like that wasn't going to help her much.

"Thank you," She started, at least hoping Grievous would respect her show of gratitude. "I...think they were hoping I would help them."

"Help them?" He mocked. "How were they thinking someone like you could help?"

"My mechanical knowledge. They thought I would offer it to them in exchange for mercy."

Grievous was silent for a few moments. Sakajin wondered if what she said would make him angry or not, when she finally heard him speak.

"...I'll admit one thing," He growled, softer than before. "I'm surprised you didn't start sniveling to the enemy at the first opportunity. If you continue to surprise me yet, you might even make out for a decent apprentice."

He started to stand, obviously to leave for something or another, but Sakajin stopped him.

"What?" He demanded lowly. The apprentice held out her wrist, showing the cuff that she couldn't get off herself.

"I think they used this to track us, that's how they ambushed us on the landing platform," She quickly explained, almost afraid if it was still tracking her. "I haven't been able to get it off since they put it on me."

Sakajin hoped that Grievous might have a tool or something to get it off, but all he did was reach out with both of his hands, grip the cuff, and rip it apart with one solid movement.

It hurt, the metal scraped against her skin, and the rough motion did plenty to jostle her body, but Sakajin was freed of the cuff.

She rubbed at her wrist while Grievous left the room, possibly to make communications with Count Dooku. It could take a while to get back to the Black Halo. And maybe that was a good thing.

Sakajin needed to be alone with her thoughts,

relief,

and guilt.


End file.
